However, the recent debate around the low-quality and made-for-advertising sites, plus buyers’ concerns over the excessive use of AI-driven media buying tools like Performance Max—which critics say trades transparency for performance—could end up meaning brands are getting less value for advertising.
“I don’t think you can look at Privacy Sandbox in isolation from Performance Max,” the executive noted. “The more that ad-tech intermediaries focus on getting the most lucrative possible ads on the cheapest content, the less value brands get for advertising. A lot of market advantage ends up moving toward any SSP that is willing to have extremely low standards on what sites they’ll monetize.”
In an ideal world, every advertiser would have an inclusion list of premium publishers, so low-quality sites would stop serving ads, ultimately giving more leverage to publishers.
Publishers again get the short end of the stick
Meanwhile, the nonprofit Movement for an Open Web (MOW) raised concerns over Google’s increasing visibility over the auction dynamics, potentially leaving publishers even more in the dark.
“The CMA didn’t mention that only Google can compare the results of Prebid-sourced demand, Privacy Sandbox-sourced demand and its own sourced DV360-soured demand that makes up a significant percentage of publisher’s revenues,” a MOW spokesperson told Adweek.
The sole purpose of an SSP, the spokesperson said, is to aggregate demand from multiple sources and optimize the best bid prices for a publisher’s ad inventory. However, Google’s Privacy Sandbox protocol Fledge—a mechanism to enable elements of ad retargeting but at the browser level—eliminates their ability to do so.
“Publishers’ too want to compare which business-facing solution partners can help them. But Google is eliminating visibility and choice from publishers to select various sources of aggregated demand,” the spokesperson added.
Adweek has reached out to Google for comments.
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