Cookieless World

On April 18th, Google published the results from Google Ads’ interest-based advertising testing, where, among other tools, Topics API was analyzed. We are happy that the Google Ads team joined RTB House and Criteo in openly publishing findings from experiments with Privacy Sandbox APIs.

In the report, the Google Ads team compares the effectiveness of applying Topics API, contextual signals, and publisher first-party IDs instead of cookies for Interest-Based Advertising (IBA). Third-party cookies were allowed in this experiment for use cases unrelated to targeting, such as frequency capping and measurement.

The cookieless future is fast approaching, and this means that brands need to rebuild their marketing strategies around alternatives to third-party cookies. Navigating this new environment will require mastering a suite of tools, including another type of cookies: first-party cookies.

To understand how you can make the most of first-party cookies, let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and how advertisers use them.

In this Media Review, you can read 6 stories, including big tech antitrust update, Meta letting users opt out of some targeted ads (and only in selected countries), and ramping the FLEDGE origin trial back up and launching isolated experiments.

In this Media Review, you can find out more about the testing progress of FLEDGE, the green light for the joint venture creation of TrustPID—a digital ad platform (by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone), the Privacy Sandbox Beta coming to Android, and more.

Have you heard of Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) yet? SDA was released at the beginning of 2022 by Project Rearc – an initiative that came to life as the IAB Tech Lab’s answer to the impending demise of 3rd-party cookies. Although a year hasn’t passed since its release, SDA has received significant attention in the press and industry conferences and is considered one of the go-to solutions for targeting when the 3rd-party cookie pond dries up.

As a leading buy-side platform, RTB House has been involved in the development of the Privacy Sandbox ever since its announcement. Being highly experienced in retargeting, we put particular emphasis on FLEDGE. This proposal has been in preparation for years now and has been available for testing in Chrome since April 2022.

We already shared our initial findings from the experiments in a previous article. It covered the availability of the elements for testing, our setups, and the initial results.

In this article, we would like to provide an update on the status of both the market and RTB House as of the end of January, give more insights and results, and share our perspective on the future testing and implementation phases.