Google may need to delay the death of cookies yet again if more publishing and ad tech partners don’t test the alternative ad auction that Google is building, according to ad tech firm RTB House.

It’s been almost a year since Google opened testing of FLEDGE, a core piece of its so-called “Privacy Sandbox,” which is a series of proposals to ween internet publishers and advertisers off third-party cookies. However, key players don’t seem to be jumping in, namely supply-side platforms [SSPs] that work with publishers to sell ads, according to RTB House.

“Low adoption of FLEDGE among SSPs is a serious and surprising issue,” RTB House said in a report it published this week based on initial tests. RTB is on the advertiser side of the ad tech equation and has been testing FLEDGE to see its capabilities and how much ad inventory is available and from which sources.

“The outcomes of tests may influence the timeline of third-party cookies deprecation,” the report continued. “If tests prove that required adjustments to the proposal are more extensive than currently expected, another delay may be announced.”

Google is “firmly committed to the timeline” to deprecate cookies by the end of 2024, a spokesperson for the company said in an email statement.

Google’s work in Privacy Sandbox is a source of intense interest in the ad world since it could alter the fundamental infrastructure of online auctions. Google is testing alternative methods of targeting ads besides cookies and other third-party identifiers—using more anonymized, aggregated data about users, so that publishers and advertisers don’t access personal information. But Google has had setbacks with Privacy Sandbox, including twice postponing the timeline to kill cookies. While Google works on it, many industry forces, with new identity solutions, from companies such as LiveRamp, ID5 and The Trade Desk, are building new ways to target ads that already ditch cookies.

Google has another challenge, too, as it faces antitrust complaints from the U.S. Department of Justice and the EU. Google is being sued by the DOJ over how it ran internet ad auctions for years, with authorities alleging the company leveraged its position as the intermediary between publishers and advertisers in ways that stifled innovation and boxed out ad tech rivals. Now, Google is remaking internet ad auctions through experimental new systems such as FLEDGE, which some ad tech providers, including RTB House, think could level the playing field if developed fairly.

FLEDGE stands for “first locally executed decisions over groups experiment,” where the auctions run directly on the web browser, so data about consumers never leave devices. FLEDGE is partly considered more privacy-centric because it doesn’t rely on tracking consumers across websites to retarget ads.

FLEDGE has the potential to work, and even give publishers more power in Google’s ad tech ecosystem, according to Łukasz Włodarczyk, VP of programmatic ecosystem growth and innovation at RTB House. FLEDGE opened the “possibility of creating a level playing field with an ad auction that is fully managed by the publisher,” Włodarczyk said.

The FLEDGE API—application programming interface—could give publishers and advertisers more transparency about the bidding activity in the auctions, Włodarczyk said. With FLEDGE “it will be easier for publishers troubleshoot to find potential issues” Włodarczyk said. “Also, it will be way more transparent from the perspective of the value of a bid, so there will be no possibility to hide the margins.”

FLEDGE is not getting widespread adoption, even though RTB House said it is “truly a valuable concept.”

There are some big-name early testers, including Amazon, which built a “bidding function” that complied with FLEDGE standards, RTB House found. Also, the programmatic advertising firm Teads created interest groups in FLEDGE, RTB said in its report.

The FLEDGE tests are expanding, if slowly. Since August, Chrome made 5% of users eligible for ads delivered through the new auctions. In December, 20 million users globally were in interest groups available for ad targeting through FLEDGE, up from 1 million users in August, RTB House found.

However, publishers have been slow to jump into FLEDGE, in part, because third-party cookies are still available as targeting options, which lowers the urgency to try the new system. Publishers and supply-side platforms are waiting for Google Ad Manager, the publisher services arm of Google, to offer a FLEDGE option, RTB House said in its report.

“The problem comes with the fact that building a solution to execute FLEDGE auctions requires engineering effort,” said Mateusz Rumiński, the go-to-market lead at RTB House, in an email. “SSPs could build their solutions, as the specification of FLEDGE is public. However, many of them are waiting for Google to provide a solution as part of the Google Ad Manager (ad server) offering.”

Google is hoping that as demand-side testing from advertisers increases, more publishers and their ad tech partners will start testing, too. “We're working with SSPs, as well as others across the industry, to increase live testing in the coming months,” Google’s spokesperson said in an email. “As we approach the general availability of the Privacy Sandbox APIs on Chrome, we are seeing increasingly high levels of engagement from the sell-side and buyers who see the benefit of future-proofing their solutions to use more privacy-preserving methods of delivering relevant ads.”

~ ~ ~
CORRECTION: RTB House calculated 20 million Chrome users globally who were part of interest groups for ad targeting in FLEDGE in December. An earlier version of this story misstated the regions covered in the statistic.