3rd-party Cookies

Have you ever downloaded the data Facebook has on you? Or Google? The sheer breadth of data collection has 86% of consumers worried, and this has led to a number of users leaving data-hungry social media platforms. It has also forced organizations like Google to do some soul-searching and adjust their approach to user data, notably by retiring third-party cookies.

In 2023 Google announced the depreciation of third-party cookies and began the development of the Google Privacy Sandbox. However, the deadline has once again been pushed back, this time to 2025]. The reason? “The need for more time to evaluate and test the new technologies.” Despite positive developments, RTB House’s own tests of the FLEDGE proposal, with nearly 8 million ads in 50 countries, have shown that there is still plenty of work to be done to build effective cookieless alternatives.

As a new year dawns, many of us are looking toward 2023 with trepidation. A potent cocktail of skyrocketing inflation, a looming recession, and general global instability has created a difficult environment for companies in almost every industry. However, things aren’t as bad as they seem, and if companies can take advantage of the evolving MarTech trends, they can thrive despite the adversity.

On April 18th, Google published the results from Google Ads’ interest-based advertising testing, where, among other tools, Topics API was analyzed. We are happy that the Google Ads team joined RTB House and Criteo in openly publishing findings from experiments with Privacy Sandbox APIs.

In the report, the Google Ads team compares the effectiveness of applying Topics API, contextual signals, and publisher first-party IDs instead of cookies for Interest-Based Advertising (IBA). Third-party cookies were allowed in this experiment for use cases unrelated to targeting, such as frequency capping and measurement.

The Privacy Sandbox timeline states that in Q3 2024, “Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a two-month period.” Whether or not Q3 2024 is the right time is an important question, but in this blog post, we’d like to focus on the second aspect of the deprecation—the duration of the time over which it reaches 100% of users. We will argue that a two-month timeframe (a “cliff”) is too quick and therefore, dangerous. To maximize the chances of AdTech successfully transitioning to a cookieless world, the deprecation ramp-up should be more prolonged, gradual, and known in advance.

Brand safety is something you’ll often hear marketers talk about, and at face value, it seems pretty simple. It’s all about the methods you can use to help to protect your brand from being damaged during the advertising process. However, once you ask marketers exactly how they protect your brand, things get a little more complicated.

To some, it might simply mean ensuring that messaging, imagery, or messenger doesn’t land you in hot water. For others, brand safety includes everything from what platforms you show your ads on to ensuring you’re not caught off guard by current events. To help you get to grips with this essential topic, this article will try to answer a crucial question: What is brand safety, and why should you care about it?