By Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell
A move by Google to rein in tracking of web users drew mixed
reviews in the ad world, with some executives expressing cautious
optimism the change will be good for consumers and others worrying
it will increase the tech giant's industry stranglehold.
The Alphabet Inc. company announced Wednesday that its ad tools
would no longer support individual tracking of users across
websites starting in 2022. Taken with a similar announcement last
year that Google plans to stop supporting a key tool for such
tracking, called third-party cookies, the moves represent a major
shift from the largest player in digital advertising, an industry
where many companies rely on tracking and targeting users.
Advertisers use data harvested from people's browsing across the
web to figure out whom to serve an ad to, and whether that person
then went on to buy the advertised product. After Google's change,
they won't be able to get as detailed a picture of either.
"In a way, you are losing the ability to track and measure
behavior as we have been accustomed to at this point," said George
Popstefanov, chief executive of digital ad agency PMG. However, he
supports the change, which he believes is better for consumers. "I
think our ability to track and measure is going to change, but I
don't think it's going to be worse," he said.
Scott Hagedorn, North America chief executive of Omnicom Media
Group, a collection of media agencies, said the Google privacy
change is part of an inexorable trend the company had long been
preparing for. "We've been planning for it for 10 years," he said,
describing the change as seismic.
In recent years, this preparation meant testing out ways to work
directly with large tech platforms such as Google without being
able to peek at any personally identifiable data. Google's latest
move will accelerate this kind of dynamic, Mr. Hagedorn said.
Others in the industry saw Google's move as an anticompetitive
power grab. "This is Google unilaterally trying to define the
privacy standards for the internet," said John Nardone, CEO of
Flashtalking, an ad server company. "It's not appropriate."
Google is proposing its own technologies that it says will
accomplish many of the same things advertisers were trying to
achieve by tracking web users down to the individual level, but in
a way that better respects consumers' privacy.
These include tools that promise to group consumers into
interest groups, or cohorts, on their devices, and never send their
browsing information to a central server. Google has claimed that
these tools have performed nearly as well as the existing tools --
which track consumers individually -- and is beginning to open them
to testing by the industry.
Mr. Popstefanov of PMG said it is too soon to determine how well
they really work. "Is it going to be as good as what we have? No.
It's too early to tell whether it's going to give us the insight we
need."
Advertisers will have to decide whether they are comfortable
with the new Google approach to targeting ads, which will be less
precise. "When you're able to target precisely to individuals your
effectiveness is very high," said Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing
and communication officer at Mastercard. "When you're doing it to
cohorts it's bound to be lesser than the individual, but we don't
know how much less at this point in time." He said it would take
time to decipher the impact of Google's plan.
Ad executives said companies that have a lot of first-party data
-- information they have gathered on their own customers, such as
through apps or loyalty card programs -- will be in a stronger
position to carry out precise digital ad campaigns.
Companies that don't have a lot of first-party data or whose
business models are focused on new customer acquisition versus
marketing to existing customers will face challenges, according to
John Lee, chief strategy officer at digital marketing agency
Merkle.
"You don't have this crutch anymore," said Mr. Lee. "You've got
to use first party data."
Because of the potential weakness of Google's replacement, some
advertising executives believed the move created an opening for
other industry players who have been working on alternative
technology to track users in a privacy-safe manner.
"I see this as a major declaration of opportunity for the rest
of the ad ecosystem," said Paul Silver, global chief strategy
officer at MiQ Digital, a company that helps agencies with their
media buying.
Advertisers who want to target users individually across
websites will be able to do so -- just not with Google's ad tools,
Mr. Silver said.
The Trade Desk, a company that makes tools for advertisers, put
forward a technology that would create identifiers for users based
on their emails; the plan is currently being reviewed by the
Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an advertising
industry group.
PRAM has been seeking to work with Google to create privacy-safe
identifiers that would work in Google's Chrome browser after
cookies are removed.
Although Google's announcement on Wednesday seemed to take aim
at these types of solutions, Google hasn't yet weighed in on
whether the solutions pursued by PRAM will work in Chrome when
cookies go away next year. Google's Chrome has a dominant share of
the web browser market.
"We are disappointed that Google didn't work more closely with
the industry prior to announcing its plan," said Bill Tucker,
executive director of the PRAM effort. "But we believe that this
presents a critical opportunity for future collaboration."
Other agency executives agreed with Google's assessment in a
blog post announcing the change Wednesday that individualized user
tracking isn't likely to survive future regulatory action on
privacy.
"Whether we like it or not, even if you can find ways to supply
Band-Aids and keep going, legislation will kill those Band-Aids,"
said Simon Poulton, vice president of digital intelligence at
WPromote.
Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com and Alexandra Bruell
at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 03, 2021 20:10 ET (01:10 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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