In a Jan. 10 blog post, Victor Wong, senior director of product management for Privacy Sandbox, disagreed with the notion that Privacy Sandbox must be completely designed before the industry can adopt the technology.

Room for improvement: aggregate reporting and video solutions

Privacy Sandbox’s aggregate reporting is currently too vague for publishers and marketers to effectively understand, said Katsur. Plus, Privacy Sandbox currently has fewer solutions for online video, a category of inventory where publishers typically fetch higher CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), he noted.

Moreover, a solution for retargeting, Protected Audience API, runs ad auctions in the browser instead of the ad server, which potentially undermines contractual agreements between publishers and the ad-tech providers that are typically involved in the bidding process, Katsur said.

“When we tackled Sandbox, very candidly, it was a bit of a labyrinth,” said Andrew Casale, president and CEO of supply-side platform Index Exchange, at a panel hosted by Google Privacy Sandbox at the conference. “There was documentation, but it wasn’t super intuitive.”

Privacy Sandbox will be constantly updated based on industry feedback, said Anthony Chavez, vp of product management at Google, at the panel.

Testing woes

Sources at the IAB’s ALM said testing among their clients is still minimal to nonexistent.

“We’re a small company,” said Josh Koran, chief product officer at measurement firm and demand-side platform InMarket. “We can’t afford to distract our engineering team if … there is no evidence that it works.”

But testing is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Publishers want to know that they will receive ad dollars for bids if they test Privacy Sandbox solutions, and buyers are waiting for fully baked offerings from the sell side.

Even companies spending months understanding and implementing Privacy Sandbox are still not seeing an influx of testing. At one SSP, Privacy Sandbox testing comes mostly from test budgets, sometimes from the coffers of a DSP and not individual brands. At Mediavine, testing just started this month, Martin said.

This doesn’t mean no one is taking action. DSPs like Criteo and RTB House have already extensively tested Privacy Sandbox, and smaller buying platforms like Programmatic Mechanics are integrating into Sandbox so that their clients can test it.

“There’s nothing else we’ve seen that is that viable,” said Ben Lewis, vice president of business development at DSP and managed service platform Programmatic Mechanics, noting that because Chrome has the biggest market share of all browsers, ad-tech firms have to play ball.