For years now, advertisers and media vendors have been collecting user cookie data or device Ids for general analysis or defining better targeting options for their ad campaigns. With the advent of GDPR in the EU law, user compliance has been given utmost importance before collecting any form of User data or Cookies/device ids. The effects of this change in user compliance guidelines has been seen not just in the EU but globally.
During the Pre GDPR times, programmatic advertising generally relied on 3rd party cookies to help make ad personalization possible. This came with an unrestricted use of cookie/ device Ids, thus lacking transparency from both advertiser and publishers. This lack of transparency has resulted in numerous problems that advertising industry has to deal with:
- Oversupply of inventory: Since publishers don’t get the chance to understand the true market value of their inventory, they are encouraged to run more placements from multiple ad platforms.
- Uncertain ad delivery: The conflicting interests of advertisers and publishers with respect to impression counting has been intensified by the lack of transparency and over-supply of inventory. This, in turn, has led advertisers to look for ad viewability.
- Fraudulent Advertising: Manipulation and proliferation of ad traffic buy the use of bots and other malicious practices further emphasizes the need for transparency.
The context of GDPR indirectly addresses the lack of transparency issue in programmatic advertising.
Post GDPR, it is important for both Advertisers/Brands and publishers to have clear consent for marketing purposes from the user. This means that advertisers must reconsider their strategies for programmatic media. After the California Consumer Privacy Law, privacy changes are being developed in browsers like Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Edge. Google in august announced that they have a new initiative (known as Privacy Sandbox) to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web for Google Chrome. This they said will be a two-year long process which will phase out the support for 3rd party Cookies.
What does programmatic advertising look like post GDPR?
Since GDPR, several practices came into picture over the last year. Below are some major changes that were observed:
– Moving away from audience targeting to Contextual targeting: With GDPR, assumptions were made that advertisers would move to traditional buying model, contextual ads eg: Sports ad on sports pages instead of audience targeting which relied on cookies. However, the potential impact was less than 15% globally.
– Working with trusted publishers: An increase in programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace buys was observed post GDPR, with less reliance on Open Exchange buys. This is because PG and PMP buys allow advertisers to work directly with the publishers in the controlled setting and avoid working with malicious publishers who leverage their data and audience in shady
– 3rd Party Data Sources: Usage of 3rd Party Data has largely reduced and the practice of buying data from 3rd party vendors will largely come to end.
– CMPs have been given a priority: With the adoption of Consent Management Providers(CMPs), users are fully aware of their data being collected and used for advertising purposes, thus having full transparency.
GDPR has brought many changes to programmatic advertising, and while changes in privacy and data collection has restricted marketing in several ways, the opportunity for richer and much needed consumer-centric advertising might just be worth it.
