Google wants you to help them save the open web
But with AI coming - will there be much left to save?
Google finds itself in a fascinating position at the moment.
After years or announcements and delays, the company finally started - very gradually- phasing out cookies this month.
And now, the tech giant is trying to get advertisers on board with a slew of homegrown solutions, including the much-discussed, super-confusing Privacy Sandbox.
Think of it this way:
Google has been a dominant player in digital advertising for decades
The company’s Chrome browser is the predominant way people surf the web
After years of regulatory pressure and a general tide shift toward privacy, Google is getting rid of cookies
That move stands to benefit any player with scaled first party data - like say Google
But it also may hurt the third party programmatic side of Google's business - which could indirectly hurt Google’s core business
In the background, AI is coming, promising to completely upend search and the makeup of the entire internet
Not to mention that the company that is constantly being sued for theoretically alledgedly a monopoly is potentially positioned to drive/dictate how the entire digital ad economy works
Other than that, it’s business as usual. For the time being, getting people to understand, experiment with, and adopt the products being offered via the Privacy Sandbox is priority number one.
Right now, people are confused, if not angry or highly skeptical.
“It's baffling. I'm pretty technical,” said Ari Paparo on my podcast
To help, I spoke to Victor Wong Senior Director of Product Management at Google, on my show this week. He knows the stakes are high.
“I think collectively, we are trying to make this big paradigm shift, not just for online advertising, but the broader web industry,” he said.
It was super helpful conversation, though truth be told, it’s not easy to wrap your head around this very complicated subject.
So what is the Privacy Sandbox, exactly?
“It is basically is just a different set of APIs to call where rather than returning a cross-site identifier, like third-party cookies for the ad tech to write and read on their own servers, instead we're basically giving the developers through this API a way to accomplish the same task without knowing who the specific user is,” said Wong.
“Our goal really is to enable developers to show relevant ads without necessarily showing who the user is. That is the end goal here.”
Mike’s layman’s translation: Google wants to help websites show people ads based on what they do online, without knowing who they are. That feels like a downgrade compared to the promise of ‘one-to-one’ marketing online. Which is why cookie alternatives like the Trade Desk backed UID 2.0 are appealing to some - since theoretically these tools will allow brands to keep marketing to specific people - albeit in a privacy safe way.
But Google seems to be betting that AI is going to advance to the point that products like the Sandbox will be able to deliver ad targeting that is just as good or better than the old way of doing things.
They just need to get customers to start playing in the Sandbox.
“We do have a great group of initial testers, but it is going to take an entire ecosystem, I think, really to make this a successful endeavor,” Wong said. “We do want everyone to participate because, you know, really at the end of the day for web publishers and advertisers transitioning to more private web is just so critical, right? And having these APIs used is going to be important because that's going to bring more monetization for the publishers and more privacy for the users. That's what both are expecting.”
One thing I wondered - why does Google even care? After all, the company stil makes it big money from search ads. As Eric Seufert pointed out on Twitter, Google’s “network revenue” recently fell behind YouTube. Yes, that segment is growing, and still pulls in upwards of $7 billion a quarter.
However, there are an awful lot of headaches that come in trying to power the entire Open Web, which feels increasingly less of a priority for brands.
“We want a vibrant open web,” said Wong. “Many of our most popular products like search and Chrome depend on the open web to succeed. I mean, it is like integral basically to help the products actually operate. And so for the open web to succeed, especially against properties that might require you to log in, for example, the open web has to be able to financially support itself and it has to be able to attract consumers. And I think privacy sandbox addresses both of these. We're providing ways to do effective advertising while protecting privacy.”
My question is, what happens if the open web starts to get completely zombified thanks to AI? Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting calls it the coming “tsunami of crap.”
If generative AI leads to all sorts of garbage web content, just as conversational search promises answers rather than results, will there be enough of an independent publishing universe for Sandbox to not only power but learn from?
And what about brands in the meantime? They are enamored with targeting using first party data, and the ROI that retail media delivers. What happens if too many brands starve the web of dollars during this cookie transition time, in turn starving Sandbox of what it needs to get smarter and stronger?
Is there a chance it can’t be saved? No easy answers here.