DIGITAL ROUNDUP - MAY 2024

Welcome to this month’s edition of the roundup to some core updates in the digital advertising industry.

NB: the following represents my own opinion

Google delay 3rd Party Cookie Deprecation to 2025

Google have announced that they will be postponing the deprecation of third party cookies for a third time, into 2025, due to concerns raised by the CMA & now more interestingly, ICO in the UK (https://privacysandbox.com/news/update-on-the-plan-for-phase-out-of-third-party-cookies-on-chrome/)

DEEPDIVE

The expectation of some form of delay for 3PC deprecation on Chrome was to all extents, expected, given the previous concerns raised by the CMA in the Q423 report into the Privacy Sandbox as a means to replace functionality on the browser without reliance on 3PC.

Though whilst a lot of that was never going to be fixed within a 3 month window, the amount of flak going towards the Chrome team is now ultimately becoming a nuisance vs achieving what is evidently a better world without 3rd party cookies.

Yes Google will no doubt benefit, particularly in the advertising space & they have ad solutions which do not really require the privacy sandbox to operate with. But the point of 3rd party cookies is not just an advertising use case, it is about privacy to which the lesser known proposals e.g. CHIPS or Shared Storage API are very much inline with a privacy centric world, which can hopefully also co-exist on a W3C level across browsers.

For the advertising use cases, Google has its work cut out to make the likes of Topics, Protected Audiences & Attribution Reporting APIs more useful but also not favouring themselves. But it is moving in the right direction & I’m sure a lot of advertisers are happy that Q424 peak season is no longer at risk.

But for the more smarter brands, you can already do a lot of things without 3rd party cookies & to some degree 1st party cookies. It is time to take that leap, make the adjustments & see the Privacy Sandbox as just another means alongside a more holistic approach to digital web based advertising.

US Senate takes on privacy with federal moves & tiktok ban

US lawmakers surprisingly have moved towards the potential of some form of federal privacy law dubbed the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) whilst also doubling down on their intent to ban TikTok if ByteDance refuses to sell.

(https://www.wired.com/story/apra-congress-online-privacy-proposal/)

(https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-congress-bill-1c48466df82f3684bd6eb21e61ebcb8d)

DEEPDIVE

The US regulator / Senate office have had quite the active month of April, with two major updates that if both occur, would send shockwaves into the US advertising space and beyond.

The first is the introduction of the APRA, which would act as a Federal level law to protect consumer privacy beyond the state specific approach seen with the likes of California’s CPRA. This is very interesting given it’s similarities to how GDPR operates & will be quite the shock for US states who have not introduced any measures so far.

For advertisers, there would be likely a sense of relief to only have to plan for 1 approach across the entire country vs the more complicated state approach as seen now. Solutions like the IAB’s GPP as a consent mechanism would also likely be critical to this move.

On the other side, ByteDance’s presence in the US has taken another turn with the US Senate passing a bill to effectively ban TikTok, should ByteDance not sell. This would open up a space both in the consumer social media space but also the ad spend attributed to TikTok.

As seen in India when they banned TikTok, it was actually Meta & particularly Instagram that benefited the most. The US though has more maturity in it’s ad market so could be open to other spaces / medium entirely. But one thing is for certain if TikTok does go, the Walled Gardens win again.

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