Google

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.

Everyone loves a good challenge, but some are tougher to tackle than others. For marketers, the big one is the personalization paradox. 71% of consumers prefer personalized ad content, but 74% are also concerned about how advertisers are actually using their personal data. This creates a problem for marketers. They want to reach out to their customers with personalized content but often rely on tracking technologies that are considered invasive. Fortunately, there is an answer to this particular paradox. Brands can use data-driven strategy to leverage large anonymized datasets that provide rich personalization at scale without compromising on privacy.

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.

Topics API has been discussed many times in the media at a conceptual level, but there are few detailed studies, especially showing the scale of availability of these signals in the browser. We will try to answer the question of what causes this.

In this Media Review, you can find out more about the testing progress of FLEDGE, the green light for the joint venture creation of TrustPID—a digital ad platform (by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone), the Privacy Sandbox Beta coming to Android, and more.

Google has released an article announcing the availability of Bidding and Auction services in the web version of FLEDGE, as well as the status on pending FLEDGE capabilities. These two Google releases could have a major impact on the adoption of FLEDGE in the near future.