Some of the biggest names in advertising are banding together in reaction to looming privacy changes being made by tech giants Google and Apple.

The effort, dubbed “Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media,” includes Procter & Gamble, Unilever, General Motors, IBM and Ford; publisher NBCUniversal; agencies UM and Publicis Media; ad buying platforms The Trade Desk, MediaMath and Adobe; and trade bodies including the Association of National Advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and its Tech Lab, Network Advertising Initiative, American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the World Federation of Advertisers.

Google is eliminating third-party cookies from its popular Chrome browser in 2022, while Apple is going to start requiring apps to obtain user consent in areas such as tracking with its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) this fall. Each impacts areas such as ad targeting, analytics and how digital ads are bought and sold—marketers who used third-party cookies and IDFA to personalize and target must now reconsider their audience strategies.

Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) says it intends to solve these issues by developing new standards for the broader industry to adopt, all while maintaining compliance with consumer privacy laws including California's Consumer Privacy Act.

Google and Apple were not invited to the group, assembled over a three month span, according to Bill Tucker, who is spearheading PRAM and who also serves as group exec VP at the ANA.

“We did not invite them for the simple reason that we need to develop our point of view,” says Tucker. “We are reacting to what they did to us.” 

Apple declined to comment; Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

PRAM is the latest entrant hoping to solve the industry’s identity crisis. Companies including Merkle and LiveRamp, for instance, have their own proprietary solutions. Google itself is working with the broader industry through the W3C, a nonprofit that creates international browser standards. Without a universal consensus, however, the advertising world might be left with a cohort of different solutions that might not work across various channels.

The new alliance might wield considerable power in creating a new standard with buy-side players including P&G and Unilever on its side. Tucker says industry changes, such as privacy and ad targeting, are a result of decisions made by technology companies. Any standards PRAM develops will be taken to Google and Apple for discussion, he says.

The Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media may sound familiar to some marketers. Last February, the IAB debuted “Project ReArc,” the trade body’s attempt to rally the industry to create new standards to replace third-party cookies. Much of Project ReArc will now be folded into PRAM, according to the group.

Meanwhile, Privacy for America, a coalition that includes many of the ad industry’s trade bodies which represent members such as Google, Facebook, AT&T and Amazon, will advocate PRAM's privacy initiative, according to Tucker.