Progress on Possible Solutions
The industry faces an uncertain future as the third-party cookie, a means to intimately track consumer activity and return on investment, makes its exit. With the death of the long depended on identifier just around the corner, industry groups around the world continue to race towards finding the most viable cookie alternative. We’re starting to see some progress.
Google Sandbox announced on Monday, that more than 30 different proposals have emerged from their industry collaboration, with 5 cookie-replacement solutions being available for testing in the very near future. Of these short runners, one of the most promising, according to Google is The Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC) algorithm. A FloC cohort is described as being derived by using on-device machine learning to observe the browsing behavior of a group of people rather than an individual. While this could be good news for the privacy minded consumer, the effectiveness of this proposed solution remains to be proven. Google claims that cohort advertising can be as useful as third-party cookies – and that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.
In response, Google is planning on making these FloC based cohorts available for testing in the Spring and have reached out to IAB Canada to ensure that our local stakeholders participate. As we are openminded and optimistic that this could be a viable solution for our community we are committed to participating in any way that we can to represent our membership and the needs of our stakeholder groups. We will keep you informed on all developments and will be forming a FloC testing working group in the very near future.
Another collaboration, IAB Tech Lab and the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) extended an open invitation to the advertising and media industry to contribute proposals for further collaborative development of addressability and accountability standards and solutions.
One of the first solutions presented last year, The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 is being carefully considered. This open-source ID framework is built from hashed and encrypted email addresses and will remain open and ubiquitous while introducing significant upgrades to privacy and transparency. The decentralized nature of the framework puts Unified ID 2.0 on a potential path to be managed and operated by independent, objective third parties. The work being done at the moment is an intense vetting process of the functional areas of the ID and the development of viable plan to achieve scale.
As a member of IAB Canada, The Trade Desk will be taking us through their proposed solution during a Community Uninterrupted webinar next month so be sure to register if you’re interested in learning more.
Meanwhile, as nothing is yet is set in stone, and all options are good options at this early stage of the game, the Tech Lab is encouraging the submission of additional addressability and privacy-driven solutions and components, which will be evaluated and considered in similar fashion. It is our hope that there will be several additional proposals to evaluate in the coming months. It is remarkable to see so many passionate engineers collaborating to assess and build out these proposals. If you would like more information please find it here.
We encourage you to join the IAB Canada Project Rearc discussions. Please email us at policy@iabcanada.com if you would like to get involved.