Until recently, you couldn’t swing a cat in ad tech without also hitting someone pontificating about the end of third-party cookies and Privacy Sandbox testing. (PSA: Please don’t swing cats.)
But since July, when Google announced that deprecation in Chrome is no longer in the cards, there’s been relative silence.
Cookies “went from dominating the discourse to basically nothing,” says Mike O’Sullivan, co-founder of Sincera, a startup that gathers and supplies metadata to the ad tech ecosystem.
“There were companies putting out a ton of marketing: ‘Get ready for Sandbox! Test it! You’ve gotta do it now!’ – and that’s gone to zero,” O’Sullivan says. “The general sentiment seems to be, ‘Google blinked, so I don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore,’ although no one would ever phrase it that way publicly.”
Meanwhile, it’s not like the sword of Damocles isn’t still dangling dangerously in the form of Google’s planned user choice mechanism on Chrome, which will reportedly be offered at the browser/account level as opposed to on a site-by-site basis à la ATT. (h/t Scott Messer)
“That could easily be as disruptive as fully removing third-party cookies, or close to it, depending on how they do it,” O’Sullivan says.
Not so big PAAPI
But back to the Privacy Sandbox.
Putting aside the smallish crowd of companies that made testing a priority – Criteo, RTB House, Raptive, Google Ads (natch), AdRoll, Audigent (relatively recently) and a handful of others – it’s nearly possible to count the main Privacy Sandbox adopters on two hands. (You might also need one or two toes, too, but you know what I mean.)
And even when third-party cookie deprecation was ostensibly still in the offing last year, there was only modest publisher adoption of the Protected Audiences (PAAPI) and Topics APIs, according to data gathered by Sincera on behalf of Garrett Johnson, an associate professor of marketing at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
Johnson partnered with Sincera last year to develop site-scanning technology that tracks real-world adoption of the Privacy Sandbox APIs, which he’s using to support academic research on that subject. All of the data is also being made publicly available through dashboards on Sincera’s website.
Based on the data, the share of sites using PAAPI to buy targeted ads peaked at 22% in March and dropped to 13.3% in August, which was shortly after Google “blinked.” Meanwhile, the share of sites making Topics API calls for user interest groups topped out at 41.2% in February and dropped to just under 29% in September.
“The story here is that these drops are obviously correlated with Google’s announcements,” Johnson says. “You don’t see as much of a drop-off on the PAAPI side, but that’s because Google is the top-level seller by far and they haven’t taken their foot off the gas.”
Critical thinking
But “gas” may actually be the operative word here.
As O’Sullivan watched the Sandbox data flowing into the dashboards, a disquieting thought occurred to him: Were all of those PAAPI network calls happening in addition to the untold billions of existing RTB ad calls?
He looked into it, and the answer is: Yep.
Which led O’Sullivan to the conclusion that, “if this thing takes off, it could be really bad for the environment.”
“It could effectively double the energy usage of ad tech, when measured from a network bandwidth and CPU perspective,” he says.
And privacy protection aside, what would that do to the user experience?
“Let’s just think about it from the point of view of a regular person, like my sister,” O’Sullivan says. “She doesn’t understand K values or what have you, but she does know that the shoe ad is still following her around – because she’s in a protected audience – and now her phone is hotter and the battery drains faster. So, what problem are we solving?”
It’s a good question, but it’s also just good to be asking informed questions based on real data, like the publicly available Sandbox adoption data housed in Sincera’s dashboards.
If people have data about what’s actually happening, “that can hopefully raise the bar across the board and make ad tech have a more introspective rather than a reactive mindset,” says Sincera Co-Founder Ian Meyers.
“It might sound grandiose,” Meyers says, “but we want to help the industry get less hand-wavy and be more quantitative and outcome-focused.”
🙏 Thanks for reading! And I know there’s no thematic link between this cat and the Privacy Sandbox or third-party cookies, but it’s too funny not to share. 😹 As always, feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] with any comments or feedback.
