DIGITAL ROUNDUP - JAN 2024

Welcome to the first edition of the monthly roundup to some core updates in the digital advertising industry. This will be a mix of indepth commentary on the bigger news as well as some interesting reads from different external vendors / platforms.

1% of 3rd party cookies to turn off on JAN 4th 2024 on Google CHrome

DEEPDIVE

This is a very important milestone for Google but also the entire adtech ecosystem. Under the watchful eye of the UK CMA who will be deciding whether this can move forward to complete deprecation, this presents the ability to see what happens when 3rd party cookies are disabled at scale on Chrome.

There are important factors to thing about. First of all, 3rd party cookies is not just an advertising use case so it will be interesting to see if general user experience / site build gets compromised from this move. Developers have had plenty of time in dev to prepare for this but this is the best form of testing & Google has added the ability for users to revert temporarily if needed.

Next for ads sake, it will be important to think about the following:

• What happens to those 1% of users for targeting / remarketing

• What happens to those 1% of users for measurement

This is the million dollar question and of course there will be an element of data loss / inefficency if you have not got a good framework to move towards. The Privacy Sandbox for all intensive purposes is not a scalable solution yet. So it will be important to conduct your own experimentation with your adtech or looking at forms of conversion modeling for measurement to see the true impact.

Ga4 to introduce enhanced conversions & PROtected Audience API

DEEPDIVE

My first thoughts was similar to the large majority, how has Google managed to introduce a form of PII based tech to a product that has always not allowed any forms of PII in it as well as the background lawsuits into proving whether Google Analytics is compliant with data regulation?!

Ultimately consented PII is becoming the new currency of choice for adtech systems. Whilst Google has subtly introduced this under the datastream settings within a GA4 property, there is still a key point for advertisers to understand the legality side of this product & what exactly it will allow Google to do.

It is a very known fact on the Google Ads side, that Enhanced Conversions is very much a “server side”-esque solution for Google & has shown incremental uplift in attribution when using Google’s ID graph to match on. The more savvy advertiser may have attempted to do workarounds with GA360 using BigQuery / identifiers & a custom tagging approach in the past, but from a legal POV, its important to understand the processing vs controlling of the data.

For the Protected Audience side, this is a no brainer for any Google adtech product and is ultimately the future of remarketing on Chrome / Android in Google’s eyes, especially when you have not a huge amount of PII to work with.

OtHeR KEY CALLOUTS

SOCIAL HIGHLIGHTS 📱

• Threads has finally launched in more countries including mainland Europe, as Meta seems to have got around data regulatory restrictions that stopped this launch originally with the use of its subscription alternative. (https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/C01LXhDrCAM)

• Elon Musk’s X is under new pressure from the European Commission, this time using the Digital Services Act (DSA) to call out its misuse of data / transparency / general misinformation. (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_6709)

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS 🌐

• YouTube buyers have some new updates to contend with, namely the introduction of Google TV as a new inventory source and the ability to do value based bidding on Video Action Campaigns within DV360. Given YouTube’s continual focus based on Adalytics reports, its important to update campaign setup where appropriate. (https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/14296467)

• Big acquistion in the Digital Out of Home space saw Perion buy Hivestack for $100m. Hivestack have continued to make strides in the DOOH space, namely within Europe & in the supply space, making it a viable platform against the Tier 1 DSPs. (https://www.businessinsider.com/perion-acquire-hivestack-for-100-million-2023-12?IR=T)

• Ad Verification coverage has increased on Shorts, with the likes of DoubleVerify updating their capability to be able to report on it. Do note as usual that YouTube ad verification is ultimately based on Google’s predefined data as passed onto 3rd parties via Ads Data Hub. (https://ir.doubleverify.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/271/doubleverify-expands-brand-safety-and-suitability)

IDENTITY HIGHLIGHTS 🆔

• Criteo have released some nice collateral on how to approach measuring the effectiveness of the Privacy Sandbox APIs. Criteo continue to show maturity in the ever-changing adtech ecosystem whilst also evolving its own Retail Media proposition. (https://medium.com/criteo-engineering/privacy-sandbox-market-testing-a-statistical-model-for-measuring-performance-impacts-2e99ff402898)

• On a similar theme, the Google Ads team have released a whitepaper on how they are integrating with the Privacy Sandbox for measurement (Attribution Reporting API), which shows that Google themselves are migrating / Chrome vs Ads are two different teams. (https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/optimizing_configuration_of_the_attribution_reporting_api.md)

• Tealium have announced a new set of integrations with Amazon to leverage first party data, namely how its CDP AudienceStream can integrate with Amazon’s Data Clean Room AMC. Is Tealium now the no.1 neutral Tag Management System in market? Quite likely at this point. (https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2023/12/13/2795663/0/en/Tealium-debuts-a-new-suite-of-Amazon-Ads-integrations-to-help-advertisers-enhance-marketing-performance-with-first-party-signals.html)

• Apple released dev notes for iOS17.2, which has one small note on the partitioning of data on a top-level, reducing the ability for cross-site tracking to be done with workarounds. (https://webkit.org/blog/14787/webkit-features-in-safari-17-2/)

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