Google’s post-cookie delay fuels advertiser anxiety—behind the issues and what’s next

Now that Google delayed the rollout of its new post-cookie advertising platform known as Privacy Sandbox, there is some consternation in the ad tech industry about how marketers and publishers will use the extra time. Will they redouble their effort to adopt this new advertising paradigm, or will they squander the time, kicking the cookie can down the road? There are members of the ad tech community hoping that advertisers and publishers take Google’s plan seriously and ramp up testing. “With more slippage in the timeline, I am worried that we will lose momentum as an industry,” said Andrew Baron, senior VP of marketplace and addressability at PubMatic, the sell-side platform that is working with publishers to test Privacy Sandbox. Everything marketers need to know about Privacy Sandbox In its bid to kill cookies and other online trackers, Google faces a mess of competing forces including regulators requiring the new platform to lock down consumer data while also leaving enough room for online businesses to track people. Some of Google’s ad tech competitors fear Google will use Privacy Sandbox to favor its ad business. There are ad tech vendors serving brands and publishers in programmatic advertising that worry Privacy Sandbox is the best hope to have a working internet ad machine when cookies inevitably go away, either forced by Google or government privacy mandates. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Last week, advertisers, publishers and ad tech companies got a better grasp of the issues with Privacy Sandbox, and what’s causing Google to stall the cookie shutdown until mid-2025 after aiming for the end of this year. The ad markets have six more months to try to implement Privacy Sandbox as the alternative for running necessary ad functions. The ad platform moves auctions into the Chrome browser, where data is prevented from leaking to market participants. The changes require publishers to invest in ad tech upgrades to participate in Privacy Sandbox auctions, and ad tech vendors to connect to a series of application programming interfaces—APIs—to manage and measure ad campaigns. The changes will not just effect Chrome, but eventually Android devices. Competitive edge Last week, the U.K.’s Competitive Markets Authority also issued its latest report on the Privacy Sandbox proposal, which the regulator is overseeing. The CMA is a major factor in whether Google can proceed, and the regulator is mostly concerned with the prospect of Privacy Sandbox harming businesses that rely on data flowing online. Digital advertising advocates from IAB Tech Lab, a part of the trade group IAB, have also warned about possible flaws in Privacy Sandbox, saying the industry needs more time before jettisoning cookies. In February, IAB Tech Lab put out an initial report outlining where it saw shortfalls in Privacy Sandbox, and some of those same critiques appeared in CMA’s latest quarterly report. The CMA touched on dozens of pain points within the platform, ranging from technical functions, such as how it handles video advertising, to broader issues around competition in the marketplace and Google’s powerful role in it. Google declined to comment for this story, but the company has addressed many of these issues before and it has been working with ad tech vendors to fix bugs in Privacy Sandbox. Google also has insisted Privacy Sandbox treats its own ad business the same as rivals, even though Google Ad Manager, which publishers use to manage ad deals on their sites, handles the ad auctions. Also read: How ad targeting may be banned under In its latest report, CMA seemed to suggest Google is on track to meet requirements to keep going with its proposal. “Google has complied with the commitments,” CMA said. “This means that in our view Google has followed the required process set out in the commitments and is engaging with us to resolve our remaining concerns ahead of third-party cookie deprecation. However, further progress is needed by Google to resolve our competition concerns ahead of deprecation.” Google is being forced to walk a tightrope: The CMA is looking at the competitive landscape, preventing Google from clamping down on data that businesses need, while the Information Commissioner’s Office, also mentioned in the report, is concerned about privacy. “You kind of have this double dynamic where the CMA on one hand is looking at the design from an anti-competitive lens, is this a pro-business solution,” said an executive at an outside ad tech vendor, who has worked closely with Google on developing Privacy Sandbox, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “And the ICO is looking at the design from a privacy lens is this a safe solution for the consumer. Sometimes those two positions are on opposing ends of the spectrum.” Pain points The regulators and industry analysts that have looked at Privacy Sandbox have made some key suggestions to Google to make improvements. The extra six months could address some of them. For instance, the early testers have said that the privacy restrictions have made it more difficult to serve video ads and native ads, which are formats that are bespoke to individual web pages. Some publishers have also expressed dissatisfaction with how Google positions them to use Google Ad Manager as the top-level auction in Privacy Sandbox. That means Google Ad Manager is the last word on which bid wins the ad inventory. Google has said it won’t participate in auctions, withholding a source of ad supply from publishers that don’t use GAM as the top-level auction. “As a publisher ad server our role is to provide publishers forecasting so they can negotiate direct sold campaigns without overbooking, and to pace and deliver their direct reservations optimally. Doing this requires running the top-level auction to compare all eligible direct and indirect demand,” Google has said in its feedback with CMA. Last week, the CMA pressed the point in its report, though: “We are continuing to discuss these concerns with Google. This is a high-priority area for us to resolve.” Cloud computing is another focus in the clash. Beyond killing cookies, Google plans to implement extra privacy protections to handle certain data for important advertising operations, such as measuring campaigns. By 2026, Google intends to require ad tech vendors and advertisers to use “trusted execution environments” in the cloud if the marketers want to work with any data outside of Chrome’s confines. So far, Google has made Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services the only trusted environments. Google has a proposal to onboard additional public cloud providers to participate, the CMA said in its latest report. Still, the CMA was looking into the “costs and complexity of adopting” cloud services outside of Google’s ecosystem, and the effect that would have on Google rivals. The CMA’s focus on the cloud factor is warranted as many ad tech vendors have their own infrastructure to run the type of computations that Google is permitting, said Justin Rau, group product manager at NextRoll, the marketing technology company that is testing Privacy Sandbox. “We set up our own and invested a lot of time and energy having our own [Trusted Execution Environment],” said Rau. “So, we’ve done the heavy lifting, which is really exciting, but it takes a lot of setup. It’s a heavy investment and there are limitations on where you can set up a TEE.” Limited testing Perhaps the biggest speed bump in Privacy Sandbox adoption, however, is the small sample size of the tests. In January, Google designated 1% of traffic as cookieless, enabling the early testers to run experiments on that group of Chrome users. Without robust participation, though, those auctions have not given enough data to the marketplace to understand exactly how Privacy Sandbox will change the game, according to multiple ad tech vendors and agencies that have tried it. “There’s not much to derive about Privacy Sandbox signals themselves right now for advertisers, given that cookies are still present on 99% of Chrome,” said one ad agency executive at a major media holding company, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The agency ran limited tests of Privacy Sandbox for an advertiser, and it found anomalies in how the campaign delivered against its expected audience. The test showed Privacy Sandbox could work, but it was inconclusive on how it would ultimately affect advertising markets if Google kills cookies on 100% of traffic, the agency executive said. The concern now is that publishers and advertisers may take their foot off the gas in building for Privacy Sandbox, as cookies still buttress the market. “Marketers have one hundred priorities this year and this is not at the top of the list unfortunately,” said one prominent ad tech executive, who is a participant in Privacy Sandbox and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The cookie is still there for now and until it isn’t it’s not going to be the top priority, and so the general sentiment does seem to be barreling toward last-minute readiness.”

Google’s post-cookie delay fuels advertiser anxiety—behind the issues and what’s next

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