GDPR may have been just the start. The new European data protection regulation caused shockwaves last year when it forced stringent new consent limitations on how companies gather and use audience data.
But a collection of new developments promises to mean ad land must continue to respond and evolve to the changing privacy landscape.
That is according to an executive from one of Dentsu Aegis Network’s data-driven ad agencies.
“Still, I think you see changes going on,” says AJ Kintner, Merkle M1 VP business development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
He cites similar privacy regulation mooted for California and Vermont as changing the game – but it doesn’t end there.
“What happens if the cookie goes away?,” he asks. “We’re seeing a decrease of cookies in the space, Apple’s making a lot of changes with their policies.
“People are kind of a little bit worried that what we’re currently doing in optimization or targeting might change. So everyone’s kind of asking, ‘How are we going to fix it?’ And there’s not a lot of solutions right now.”
Around the industry, tech vendors are scrambling to offer that solution – combining multiple fragments of an individual’s identity, as laid by different digital devices, uniting them in to a singular whole.
Parly as a hedge against that, Kintner wants to see more direct deals done between publishers and ad buyers.
“(After the changes), IP addresses might be PII (personally-identifiable information),” Kintner says. “If that’s true, that’ll change a lot of how companies in the ecosystem work. I mean, device graphs are currently being built off of IP addresses across the board of many companies. So if that goes away and becomes a private PII, it could change a lot of the ecosystem.
“We hope the privacy (issue) doesn’t come out of nowhere and just stop a lot of what we’re doing in programmatic. That’s the worst case scenario, (that) we have to switch so fast to a cookie or an anonymous ID.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
