Regardless of Chrome’s timelines, our overall advice remains the same – the changes are coming and we are keen for everyone across the eco-system to understand the proposed changes, prepare for those changes and start testing as soon as possible. This advice is not just for Chrome – but across the full range of different browsers for web, and operating systems for in-app environments.

There are essentially three main approaches that will remain fully future proofed moving forwards.

1. ID-Enabled Responsible Addressability: activation, targeting and measurement managed via robust and persistent ID solutions to enable identifying consensual users across multiple devices and platforms. This allows advertisers to track user behaviour and preferences over time and deliver relevant targeted advertising. Importantly these persistent IDs are built from consented, anonymised and encrypted PII data and will adhere to any forthcoming regulatory changes if implemented and managed competently.

2. Contextual & Seller Defined Audiences: leveraging contextual targeting to target, based upon the content consumers have been consuming, will remain 100% future-proof. Additionally, IAB’s Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) will be an important method for sellers to enable audience buying for buyers through advertising based on groups of users, without revealing individual user identities and without any data being linked in any way.
3. On-Device Facilitated Personas: a wide range of ever-evolving APIs from the major tech players that are striving to enable the mechanics of digital marketing in a privacy-preserving manner by leveraging the capabilities of browsers and mobile devices as secure environments for consumers, whilst also acting as facilitators of cohort-based marketing solutions. Many of these proposals are in beta or endlessly evolving and each are slightly ad-hoc. Rather than having DSPs creating targeting attributes through the collection of data via identifiers (such as 3rd party cookies) - user data will instead remain on-device and be anonymised, aggregated and synced to ad tech vendors via APIs. Examples are Microsoft’s Ad Selection API for Edge, Apple's SKAdNetwork and Private Click Measurement for iOS and Google’s various Privacy Sandbox APIs such as Topics, Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting.

The IAB’s tech lead Jonas Jaanimagi had this to share; Australia highly recommends all industry members to review each of these approaches, ascertain their usefulness to their business and invest the time, effort and resources into testing each diligently with competent teams and/or partners. We have published, and will continue to publish, handbooks, explainers and other guidance on all of the above – as well as regularly presenting any updates and related best practices at our various industry events.”

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