• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, December 13, 2023

Google Chrome’s about-to-be-implemented cookie-deprecating Privacy Sandbox is a “hypercomplicated” scheme likely to benefit virtually no one other than Google and its own ad business — and advertisers should be seriously engaged in activating other identifiers.

That’s the stance being taken by independent DSP The Trade Desk, as laid out by its Vice President, Product Bill Simmons in TTD-operated site The Current.

Simmons refers to the Sandbox as “the anti-moonshot,” contending that Google blew the opportunity to reinvent the way the Chrome browser handles privacy and engineer a system that would have benefitted and encouraged growth and progress for the entire open internet economy.

Instead, he argues, the Sandbox will inhibit audience targeting by obscuring the identity data about individual users and making it harder to coordinate advertising across devices and measure and optimize performance.

“It could limit the ability to run attribution models, randomizing interest groups and contextual information,” predicts Simmons, who prior to joining TTD co-founded Dataxu, acquired by Roku in 2019. “Furthermore, I foresee Privacy Sandbox creating on-device auctions that will add even more latency to page loads and ad rendering, degrading the user experience while ads populate more slowly on the page.”

All of this will also likely depress the value of ads, he stresses: “Not only will Privacy Sandbox ads have a lower CPM, but the technological complexity to activate them is extremely high.”

Beyond all of this, implementing the complicated APIs, which could be particularly daunting for start-ups, could make companies dependent on technology that would leave them “at the mercy of Google’s team to keep them in place over the long run,” he points out.

The preferable alternative, allowing for a privacy-conscious open internet that works for all parties involved, is to build or boost alternate opt-in identity strategies with authenticated IDs that can persist in real-time bidding auctions, Simmons argues.

“For advertisers, now is the time to activate other identifiers —such as Core ID, RampID, or Unified ID 2.0 — which are designed to create and model audiences across the ecosystem,” and for publishers, it is crucial to prompt users to authenticate through tools like OpenPass, he concludes.