You know the fable. Drop a frog into boiling water and it jumps out. Put it in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat, and it doesn’t notice until it’s too late. That’s a decent metaphor for the last few years in digital advertising.
Privacy regulation has been ratcheting up. Third-party identifiers have been deprecating in slow motion. Together they’re tearing at the foundation that supports a $600 billion marketing, media, and advertising economy. As I write this, Google is turning off third-party cookies for the first 1% of Chrome users — about 32 million people. The question is whether that’s enough heat to finally make us jump.
Apple already removed about a billion Safari users from the cookie ecosystem back in 2020. We absorbed it. But Chrome has 3.22 billion users, 55% market share in the US, and 74% in Asia. The temperature is going up fast.
Threat #1: rational short-term decisions push spend into walled gardens
Brands want addressable reach. They need measurement. New-gen IDs don’t yet have the scale to replace cookies. The path of least resistance leads straight to social platforms, and that creates three predictable outcomes:
- Supply-and-demand imbalance pushes platform CPMs up while ad loads climb, which lowers attention and recall per impression. Brands pay more for less.
- Open-web publishers lose the audience-addressability competition. Premium news brands, already squeezed by overzealous brand-safety tactics, get squeezed harder. Consolidation accelerates.
- With fewer alternatives, the platforms raise prices again — but by then advertisers are locked in. Leverage moves to the gardens.
Threat #2: privacy regulation will end up benefiting the platforms it was meant to constrain
Twelve US states have passed privacy laws; at least sixteen more have bills in flight; the GDPR sits over all of it globally. The fines so far are real but not existential. Meta took a $1.7B GDPR fine in Europe. Microsoft took $64M from the French DPA and $20M from the FCC. Amazon took $30M from the FTC plus $25M for COPPA. Apple took $8M from the French DPA.
None of those numbers move the balance of power. What they do is push the platforms to lock personal data deeper inside their own walls — into proprietary targeting tools and in-house cleanrooms. Advertisers happily play along, because the platforms have the audience. Most open-web publishers don’t have the scale to run their own cleanrooms at brand level. They lose either way.
2024 doesn’t have to end like this
The status quo sets us up for a slow boil. Three changes in mindset would turn the heat down:
- Shift from individuals to groups. For nearly every targeting and measurement use case, deterministic group-level precision is plenty.
- Stop building cookies-with-a-new-name.Distributed personal identifiers can’t be the answer. Embrace privacy-preserving tech that enables addressability without sharing personal data between parties.
- Expect the work to be harder before it gets easier. No pain, no gain. The investments in privacy will only pay back if we’re willing to absorb some discomfort up front.
The water is no longer tepid. It’s time to jump. I’m optimistic you’ll jump with me.
Originally published on trustx.org.