At This Point, Shouldn't Google Be Relieved of its Sandbox Duties?

Do any regulators have the wherewithal - and teeth - to take this cookie fiasco over?

A quick note: I’m working with the team at Fabric Media on a potential custom content program at Cannes this year. If interested, please reach out to Jason Damata jason@fabricmedia.net.

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Funny story. I’m on vacation with my family this week, and figured I’d be pretty out of commission. So I set myself up by recording a podcast (with Mediavine’s Amanda Martin) ahead of time and pre-writing a newsletter schedule to hit today. That way, I wouldn’t have to think about work while waiting in line for roller coasters.

The subject of the podcast and newsletter: Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

I hear things have changed once again! Therefore, this will be a fairly quick note. I just have a few quick questions.

Regardless of the insanity of this years long cookie pullback, and whatever legitimate reasons UK regulators have for holding things up, it still seems crazy to me that Google - a massive digital advertising seller - is single-handedly developing a system (or maybe thee system) that could shape or dictate how digital advertising is measured, tracked, delivered - basically how it works.

And during this process of deprecating cookies, which is such a huge deal for the global web economy - it’s British regulators who are essentially dictating the timing and procedures for this thing

Meanwhile US regulators - even as they go after Google for all sorts of other things - are not driving or monitoring this Sandbox process at all. An American company is making moves that could immeasurably shake up multiple industries, and the feds are focused on things Google was alleged to have done like 10 years ago.

But seriously, what do I know about how governments or regulators work?

I’m not trying to be all America First. Rather, I’m wondering why somebody neutral, and global in nature isn’t positioned to take charge here. It’s apple and oranges for sure, but we can get Congress to line up and get excited about banning TikTok (which I realize has national security implications) but someone isn’t equipped here (or knowledgeable enough) to say, ‘hey, maybe the Sandbox shouldn’t be in one companies hands?’ Particular this company.

Again, what do I know, but if you look at the name of the regulatory body who is holding back Google in this case it’s the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). You’d think that one of the competitors in this particular market shouldn’t be the one dictating how the market works.

I don’t know who if anyone has this kind of authority (or should) but wouldn’t it make sense if running the Sandbox was left to someone else? Or that Google would have to spin off Chrome to make sure this is on the up and up?

I realize this is likely regulatory fantasy. But something has to be better than this nightmare process.

In the meantime, here’s the good news from the front lines: the early onset of cookie deprecation doesn’t seem to be wreaking havoc - yet.

But advertisers and media agencies need to stop waiting around and move forward on not just testing - but actually using many of the cookie alternatives in the market.

That was one of the big takeaways from my conversation with Martin, SVP, Monetization & Business Strategy, Mediavine- in an episode of Next in Media.that is still worth a listen - even if we recorded it before Google’s latest pullback.

Martin previous spend much of her career on the buy side, before joining Mediavine last year. The company builds ad tech for 10,000-plus small to mid-sized digital publishers, so it’s smack in middle of all the ‘what’s going to happen to the Open Web?’ conversations in the market.

So far, Martin said, none of Mediavine’s publishers have gone under or complained about massive revenue drop-offs from those Cookieless Chrome 1 percenters.

“There is going to be revenue shifts,” she told me. “There's going to be changes. We're not going to be able to just like smooth sail through this adjustment, but those don't have to be cliffs. And I think some of the headlines make everything feel like a cliff.”

Perhaps because of those scary headlines, too many brands have been frozen, fearing that everything goes to hell in a post-cookie world, or worse, waiting for a magic answer, Martin says.

That’s led to this “period of time that the industry wanted perfect world solutions versus functional and scalable solutions,” she said “And so I think we wasted a little bit of time as an industry, quite frankly, when we could have been endeavoring to have a solution on hand.”

That waiting is only going to continue, at least until next year. Yet however Sandbox plays out, the fundamental issue won’t change.

“On the buy side basically, they have to rethink how they target and measure digital advertising,” she said. “Some of the concerns we are hearing about are just mourning the loss of the way we've done it for a really long time.”