On the other hand, Criteo and others are likely to incur costs for their steep investments in cookieless solutions developed through Google’s Privacy Sandbox, experts say.
Criteo has been perhaps the most public in its support of the effort; the company dedicated around 100 employees to testing Sandbox products, Marketing Brew reported last year.
“They invested a lot and they might think that this was a big waste of effort,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at media firm Raptive.
The company said it has “future-proofed” its approach to privacy-protected addressability, noting in a statement shared with ADWEEK that it employs “advanced AI to consolidate and then optimize diverse signals, including alternative IDs, first-party data, contextual inputs and browser-based tools like the Privacy Sandbox.”
Criteo isn’t alone in its position. Audigent, an identity platform, invested “several million dollars” into Privacy Sandbox, the company’s CEO Drew Stein confirmed to Reuters last September. It represents a major bet, as the company’s annual revenue hovers around $150 million.
Other adtech players including NextRoll, Index Exchange, and RTB House have publicly commented on their commitments to testing Privacy Sandbox solutions.
Now, these firms may be tallying the sunk costs.
“The reactions I hear in private are [full of] fury,” said Paparo. “The anger among the people who have spent time on this is pretty intense.”
NextRoll, for its part, stands by its approach. “While we have invested heavily in the Privacy Sandbox, those efforts were not made for optics, but for impact,” Andrew Pascoe, NextRoll’s vp of data science engineering told ADWEEK. “Consumers continue to demand greater transparency and control over their data, and we remain committed to advancing privacy-first solutions, regardless of the status of third-party cookies.”
RTB House took a similar position. “We remain committed to operating with customers to strengthen campaigns across any environment, cookied or otherwise,” said Michael Lamb, chief commercial officer, in a statement. “This update does not change RTB House’s commitment to user privacy.”
Index Exchange’s svp of product, Michael McNeeley, noted that “this moment reinforces what we already know: change is the only constant” in the adtech industry. “Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, and a lot of it falls into the unknown,” he told ADWEEK. “We see this as a reminder that the future of privacy in advertising won’t be shaped by any one solution—or any one company.”
Nonetheless, these companies have largely avoided putting all their eggs in the Privacy Sandbox basket, and therefore are insulated from what could have been a potentially worse outcome.
Criteo’s stock surged on the heels of Google’s announcement Tuesday.
The Losers
Google itself may be a loser in the final count, due to the PR hit incurred in its dramatic backtracking. “This is a huge reputational hit—they just look like fools,” said Paparo. “They wasted four or five years of people’s careers and time, and they didn’t do anything meaningful for privacy. They lost a lot of goodwill. I don’t see a positive here for them.”