With the news landing this week from Google Chrome that it plans to continue to support cookies after all, it’s hard not to feel deflated. Years of adaptation, huge amounts of effort and a vision for a better future seem to be heading down the drain. It appears the ad tech naysayers have won - especially those that have vested interests in their own cookieless solutions. On the flipside, the companies who have made a concerted effort to test and improve Privacy Sandbox solutions might find themselves asking why they’ve bothered.
The key question is: was all this effort a waste, or is there still a crucial role for Privacy Sandbox in the future of online advertising?
The news this week seemingly positions cookies as a long-term competitor to the Privacy Sandbox, which places the Privacy Sandbox in a precarious position. Some projects feel particularly vulnerable: the Protected Audience API is a long way off parity with cookies and is currently a parallel auction which it now feels publishers are less likely to prioritize ahead of traditional RTB auctions. Other elements such as the Attribution Reporting API could still have a bright future. To figure out where we’re heading, there are 3 questions we need to know the answer to:
1) How will cookie choices be presented to consumers?
If this is a traditional opt-out, we might see only a low-single-digit drop-off in scale. Privacy Sandbox itself is an opt-out, and we see it active on 97% of eligible Chrome browsers. But this wouldn’t make much sense - users can already opt out of cookies on practically every page of the web, every day, as well as blocking third-party cookies in their Chrome settings.
Perhaps Google will take inspiration from the likes of iOS and user choice will be presented as a pop-up that does not allow you to browse a site until you’ve made a choice - more prominent and transparent than the current cookie selection windows, with no “dark signals” nudging consumers towards keeping cookies turned on. But when done at the site level, this may create winners and losers amongst publishers - with longtail publishers likely to be the losers - and it wouldn’t replace the need for publishers’ own consent modals, adding to the already messy state of web consent.
Or perhaps it will be a setting at the browser level, similar to how the Privacy Sandbox currently works. If so, Privacy Sandbox could be presented as the “privacy-centric” alternative to cookies. Given a binary choice, consumers could likely select the Privacy Sandbox over cookies, leading to the odds swinging firmly back in its favor. On the flipside - a trio of options: i) everything (including cookies) ii) Privacy Sandbox or iii) nothing - would present Sandbox as an odd compromise that few consumers are likely to opt for.
2) Does Privacy Sandbox have the potential to expand beyond Chrome?
So Chrome is still going to have some cookies - but what about Safari, Edge and Firefox - and MAID alternatives for iOS and Android for that fact? Chrome has been courting the other browsers for some time to get them on board. This latest announcement adds new urgency to the task of getting more browsers participating; if they can do this then the project takes on a whole new perspective as a cross-browser solution which has inherent value regardless of Chrome cookie volumes. This direction would likely steer Privacy Sandbox projects further in the privacy-centric direction in order to appease Safari and co.
The only browser so far to make a commitment to Privacy Sandbox principles is Edge - who announced their own Ad Selection API in March this year. Where they go with this in light of Chrome’s struggles will be an interesting bellwether.
There’s also been no communication yet on what this means for Android MAIDs - which were originally soft-signaled for phase out around 2025. If Google introduces ATT-style consent for these in the coming years, then the need for Privacy Sandbox alternatives also increases.
If the Privacy Sandbox project can become truly multi-platform and multi-browser, it suddenly gains vastly more relevance in this new context. If it can’t, its relevance will depend entirely on cookie consent rates within Chrome.
3) Will Google Marketing Platform integrate it?
Nothing would accelerate the adoption of Privacy Sandbox faster than Google Marketing Platform (GMP) integrating it across their stack. To-date there has been oddly little communicated on this front. As evidence, take a look through a recent DV360 roadmap and you’ll find scores of new platform features, but not a single mention of Privacy Sandbox. If Google are truly committed to this project, this should surely happen, and perhaps their latest move makes it easier for the GMP and Privacy Sandbox teams to collaborate without getting heat for anti-competitive behavior.
So what next?
It would be tempting to take this week’s announcement and rewind four years of ‘cookieless’ innovation efforts. This would be a huge mistake for several reasons:
- Until we know the answers to the above questions, we have little indication of the long-term scale & utility of Privacy Sandbox or cookies in Chrome
- The non-Chrome web has moved definitively on since 2019 - cookies aren’t what they once were, and alternative approaches are still entirely necessary
- Signal loss is still happening in Chrome - with intent to move forward with IP Protection plans in the coming years
- Most importantly of all, we consistently find that solutions that don’t use third-party cookies can perform better for our clients
It seems very likely that the industry will need to continue supporting a selection of targeting and measurement approaches, in order to reach consumers with varying levels of preference around data privacy at scale. Perhaps “both” is better - a recent retargeting test that we undertook showed that using both cookies and first-party data via cookieless identifiers together improved reach by 3x, with just a 1% audience overlap.
At MiQ we’re going to keep on investing to ensure we support all the options advertisers need to achieve successful marketing outcomes. Only with this focus can we support a sustainable ad-funded web.
