Inside Yahoo’s test of Google’s post-cookie ad platform

Yahoo is still preparing its programmatic ad platform for cookie deprecation on Chrome, despite the delay in Google’s timeline. Yahoo’s testing shows how advertisers could continue to find new consumers even in a murky data environment such as the one Google is building. Yahoo’s demand-side platform (DSP) has been using Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the cookieless ad platform built inside Chrome, to see whether “prospecting” is possible in a post-cookie environment, among other ad tech tactics. Prospecting is when brands run campaigns to find untapped audiences, as opposed to retargeting, which is when advertisers serve ads to consumers who have already engaged with their properties. Prospecting and retargeting are just two of the common practices that ad tech vendors are trying to replicate in Google’s new ad platform. “We have been able to successfully run prospecting campaigns for advertisers,” said Giovanni Gardelli, VP, ads data products at Yahoo, “which was the main objective we gave ourselves. You know, can we help advertisers find new customers … and at a high level we were able to.” Also read: How marketers can prepare for post-cookie ad tech These once-routine advertising tasks have become more difficult as advertisers get cut off from internet data. Third-party cookies are an easy method of tracking and targeting consumers online, but browsers such as Apple’s Safari already shut off cookies. Mobile ad trackers also are going away, and Google plans to curtail data-sharing on Chrome and Android devices. But last month, Google’s Privacy Sandbox team pushed back the timeline to deprecate cookies again, delaying it until at least mid-2025. Ad tech players such as Yahoo continue to see the transition as inevitable, though, and they already adjusted to Apple’s strict data rules. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Google Chrome, however, has a higher than 60% share of the global browser market. Yahoo and others play a critical role in whether Google will proceed with Privacy Sandbox, because their tests will inform U.K. regulators that are overseeing the work. Yahoo issued an update on Monday in a blog post on where its testing stands, and Ad Age spoke with Gardelli about the results so far. This interview has been edited for length and clarity How many of your advertisers have tested Privacy Sandbox? The real tests with actual advertisers started earlier this year. Because we are a fully self-serve platform, and this Privacy Sandbox is very unique in the way it requires campaigns to be configured, it’s not achievable for us to take like 1% of everybody’s budget and run tests in the back end. So, the way we approached testing was in a very transparent way. We disclosed to our advertisers the capabilities we had; the testing framework that we wanted to utilize. We had around 10 advertisers that were interested in participating in this testing phase. With us following the CMA framework process with a heavy focus on the protected audiences API first, and the reporting and attribution API second. Were there any surprises you encountered in the tests? Because the testing, based on the CMA framework, required using Mode A and Mode B labels to identify the test-and-control groups, we’ve actually observed that there is a significant number of publishers who have already integrated with the protected audiences API, but not integrated with those Mode A and Mode B labels. And so we had some more challenges than we expected in terms of scaling those test-and-control buckets. (Participants in the Privacy Sandbox auctions use Mode A and Mode B labels as a way to compare advertising against cookieless web traffic to traffic that still has third-party cookies.) That sounds technical. What did publishers need to do to facilitate the tests for DSPs? We have found that quite a few publishers haven’t done that piece of the work. We don’t know necessarily if it’s because they were not interested in testing using the CMA framework, or if publishers just didn’t get them to work in time. Still, those [Mode A and Mode B] labels don't block testing in general, but they are necessary to test within the framework that the CMA has recommended the ad tech ecosystem. That was, I guess, a surprise we didn't expect to encounter in testing, some of this fragmentation of the implementation of the various requirements for testing. Otherwise, how have Privacy Sandbox tests gone? We have been very intrigued with things. The overall product is very promising. Obviously, there’s been a lot of talks in the industry in terms of limitations. But we’re also seeing pretty interesting things working well for us. We’ve been able to scale those tests, to the extent that we could, given the traffic that was made available to us. We’ve been able to run campaigns and target audiences with this new methodology leveraging the protected audiences API. And you said you tested prospecting for new audiences? Our focus for advertisers has been helping them prospect. There’s been a lot of focus on retargeting, we wanted to focus on prospecting as the other big use case for advertisers. So, we’ve been able to run prospecting campaigns successfully, and more importantly I think over the last six months almost, we have seen a huge acceleration in terms of the number of ad tech companies in the ecosystem that have also started integrating with the Privacy Sandbox across their different areas of focus. How robust is Privacy Sandbox testing, in general, from other parts of the ecosystem? We’ve seen more and more SSPs upgrading their tech to support protected audiences and Topics API, for example. And more and more publishers also doing the work upgrading their integrations with SSPs to make their supply available against this new standard. Google has delayed cookie deprecation many times now, how confident are you that it gets done? Whether it happens in three months, six months or a year, in the grand scheme of things that’s irrelevant. We do believe it's going to happen. Other browsers have already successfully removed third-party cookies. I think the Privacy Sandbox project is a little bit more ambitious, which is why it's taking longer to build. The cookieless world is not just future, right, it's already present across other browsers and ecosystems. And so that's why we've been bullish, not just on Privacy Sandbox, but in general other technologies that help advertisers future-proof their media buying, and targeting, and measurement, and frequency management in environments where advertising IDs are not available or where user consent is also not available. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

Inside Yahoo’s test of Google’s post-cookie ad platform

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