Spotlight
Welcome to the latest edition of Spotlight, your monthly recap of the biggest stories in adtech and digital marketing.
What we have for you today: Google loses its adtech antitrust case, publishers step into the adtech driving seat, cookies are here to stay, data and privacy regulation remain key and finally there may be tough times ahead!
In a move that will be hugely frustrating for publishers and advertisers alike, Google has completed its U-turn on cookies and announced that it won’t roll out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies in Chrome.
After years of promising to deprecate cookies, then shifting to providing consumers with a robust opt-in mechanism, the tech giant has chosen instead to do precisely nothing. As well as wasting the time and energies of publishers that have been preparing for this shift, Google is now swimming against the tide of an internet that is increasingly coming to prioritise consumer choice and privacy preservation. As the industry reacted to this decision, most adtech businesses and marketers pressed ahead with privacy-first alternatives regardless.
However, in our view the days of cookies are numbered regardless of what Google does. For one, consumers are increasingly against brands and publishers tracking them online. But equally importantly, cookies just aren’t that good. Adtech using third-party cookies to match audiences can lose millions of dollars due to low match rates of around 31%-45% on average. The future lies with adtech that provides greater accuracy while better protecting consumers.
Google was also making headlines with the ruling by US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema that it illegally acquired and maintained “monopoly power in the open web display publisher ad server market and the open-web display ad exchange market.” It remains unclear how Google will be asked to remedy this situation, but a breakup of its ad business seems more likely than ever.
Industry insiders have been giving their views of the pros and cons of a potential Google breakup, which you can read about here. From our perspective, a more fragmented adtech ecosystem would be welcome, because an increase in competition will fuel innovation and provide fresh options for publishers and advertisers alike. A major shakeup in adtech will no doubt cause some short-term disruption, but over the long-term it will result in a much healthier market.
The potential breakup of Google is not the only way in which publishers are gaining more control. New technologies and processes continue to emerge that will enable publishers to be more hands-on with their advertising businesses.
The IAB Tech Lab’s Trusted Server Framework proposals are a case in point. The framework aims to empower publishers by shifting “critical advertising functions away from the browser and into publisher-operated infrastructure.” There is some debate over whether the framework will achieve its aims, but as a signifier of the direction of travel for the industry it is none the less important: more and more, publishers are in the driving seat.
New research from Digiday suggests that publishers are becoming less dependent on ad revenue. In Q1 2025, 45% of publisher pros said 61% or more of their companies’ revenues will come from advertising this year, compared with 51% who said the same in Q1 2024.
While it’s great that publishers are diversifying, they should not take their eye off the ball when it comes to advertising, which will remain the core of their business. Indeed, with the trend towards publisher empowerment, opportunities to grow ad revenues are only going to increase. Publishers that put in place the infrastructure to enable precise addressable audiences will stand to benefit the most. This is not a zero-sum game: publishers can both diversify and grow ad revenues.
With Trump’s tariffs throwing the markets into turmoil and raising the spectre of recession, advertisers are already looking to cut budgets to weather the storm. As one Forrester analyst puts it: “Should the trade policies that are in place and the reactive trade policies from other countries stay the course, both of those forces will culminate and create a situation where budgets are cut.”
Marketers therefore need to ensure that their campaigns are optimised for efficiency and ROI. That in turn means having a complete understanding of audiences and visibility over where they can be reached. Efficiency will also mean reducing waste. And here, much work still needs to be done. The latest study from Adalytics suggests that the industries challenges with bots and ad fraud are worse than previously thought. The need for audiences that are verified at source has never been more pronounced.
Brands hoping to achieve that sort of visibility have a wide variety of datasets and identifiers available to them. The signs are that many are looking to source audience insights from as broad a pool as possible, with more brands blending deterministic and probabilistic data for hybrid targeting approaches.
This is a good idea. The fact is that there will be no one silver bullet for advertisers’ data needs. Our view is that the best approach is to use whichever IDs and datasets make most sense for each campaign. It will be key to have the reliable insights of deterministic data, but equally important is putting in place a platform for interoperability to bring all different IDs and datasets together into a coherent audience engagement strategy.
There was a welcome warning from Ad Exchanger this month for brands to make sure they do not fall foul of privacy regulators by underestimating the technical competence of them.
As the article makes clear, it’s increasingly easy for regulators to check up on whether companies adhere to privacy policies and disclosures. The takeaway from all this is definite: the days of paying lip service to privacy compliance is over. Brands must embed privacy in everything they do if they’re to avoid heavy fines and brand damage.
Finally, this month saw WPP acquire data company InfoSum in a $150 million deal. The holdco believes the acquisition will enable clients “to maximise the value of their first-party data with privacy-enhancing connections to data providers and media partners, powering campaigns across the entire marketing ecosystem.”
Clearly, major holdcos see an alternative to a cookie only approach and privacy compliance as key to success and understand the criticality of rich data to achieving this. We can expect to see other significant data plays in the months and years ahead.
If you’re on the lookout for more insights on digital advertising, then check out our latest blog: Addressable advertising rebooted: a guide to building audiences in a privacy-first world.
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