MAdtech Point: The truth behind the delay in the deprecation of cookies from Google

When Google announced a three-month delay in their timeline to deprecate the third-party cookies, the entire AdTech industry went on a tailspin this last week, justifiably so. Good or bad, right, or wrong, this is being seen as “crying wolf”, so more than the actual reasons for the extension, it is the subliminal “will they ever deprecate” worry that triggered this angst.

Aqilliz is one of the affected parties, I must say, as we launched our company with a suite of solutions for the “world beyond cookies” and that world never came for more than four years! And there are many startups like ours, who are waiting for the so called “addressable market” to open up. Not just the startups, large organizations like The Trade Desk, Magnite, Pubmatic, InMobi, Affle etc., who have the Open Web as their addressable market are equally affected as well, because they too need to fine tune their solutions to be fit into the world beyond cookies. To be honest, there is no solution in sight at this moment.

Keeping the emotions aside, if we must objectively look at why Google extended the deadline by three more months, there are two broad areas of concerns, the CMA has highlighted:

1. Proper Consent Management Platform: As late as 2019, when the first announcement to deprecation of cookies was announced, one of the key requirements from the alternative solution is in their ability to capture and carry consent across the supply chain. The CMA wants Google to make the consent interface clearer for Topics API, and make sure partners using Protected Audiences API and Attribution API get user consent. The report notes the ICO’s concern that the remarketing solution Protected Audience API will not incorporate many privacy-enhancing technologies until 2026, after the planned deprecation of third-party cookies.

2. Neutrality and Transparency: CMA says, we are discussing with Google what further restrictions may be applied on their use of first-party data to target and measure ads on Google’s owned and operated (O&O) inventory, which might indirectly force more of the industry into using Google’s own ad tech. It is particularly concerning that one solution to Protected Audiences API preferences is Google’s ad server and Google Ad Manager over other ad-tech tools. Google’s interest-based targeting solution Topics is fair to all publishers and is not biased toward Google. And it wants to ensure the attribution reporting API will always collect as little user data as possible. Google currently retains significant discretion over how Privacy Sandbox works,” the report says. “This creates a risk of self-preferencing.

Both the above points are absolutely spot on. If the Privacy Sandbox from Google does not meet these two requirements, it has totally failed in offering an alternative in their own ecosystem, after they have deprecated the third-party cookies. Proper consent management, neutrality and transparency are the corner stones of the data privacy regulations across all the countries. This explains, why Google has not postponed the deprecation of trackers with the Android ecosystem and stuck to the timelines, as it is easy to implement this on mobile phones vis a vis a desktop browser.

But there is a larger question the begs an answer. Are the tech companies that are serving the OpenWeb ready to meet the same set of standards the CMA is demanding from Google? Can the alternative ID solutions that are in the marketplace offer the same standards of consent management, neutrality, and transparency?

In my view, there are no solutions in sight that can honor the code of responsible use of consumer data, yet. Perhaps, legacy businesses, might not be able to pivot their products or solutions to meet these requirements. Everyone is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, including but not limited to Google.

IAB TechLab rightly called for a total rearchitecture of the digital advertising supply chain way back in 2019. We are still reading that paper only. Not done anything at all. Status quo is not affecting anybody, so why bother?

Gowthaman Ragothaman is a 30-year media, advertising and marketing professional and CEO of Aqilliz, a blockchain solutions company for the marketing industry.