Google walling off its inventory garden

A lot has been said and talked about the impending move by Google going to ban third party cookies, web beacons or other tracking mechanisms on its Google Display Network. The move will come in effect from the new year and it will prohibit collecting of impression level data by third party pixels for purposes of subsequent re-targeting, interest category categorizations and/or syndication to other parties.

In the wake of this scenario becoming a reality soon, lets see what are the effects of this move on various entities in the display ecosystem -

Impact - Marketers are affected the most because they will not be able to figure out the number of times their ad is seen by users on Google inventory versus non-Google inventory. Global frequency capping will not work now for the campaigns running on GDN. 

Publishers,on the other hand, will not be able to lay claim to the success of marketer's campaign(running on GDN, except where they are last touch points in the campaign funnel) to themselves  and hence will have some effect on their ability to command premium price for their audience data and inventory. 

Reality and Way forward -The impact on publishers side of equation is minimal though, because the publishers deploying the services of a DMP would not be selling their inventories using adsense in most cases. Marketers should try other inventory sources. With the advent of programmatic, multiple supply side exchanges have gained prominence. Chief among them being FBX, Right Media Exchange, Microsoft Exchange, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project, Appnexus, OpenX etc.

Also this rule of not allowing third party pixels will not have any effect wherein the DMP also owns the system that is biding for the impression and hence there is no data flow from one system to other. This will give more weight to the much talked about consolidation in the display ad-tech with more of the DMP and DSP players coming together. Rocket Fuel bought [x+1] few months back. Adobe has Audience Manager(DMP) and have built out a DSP through their Efficient Frontier acquisition. Turn and Ignition One also offer a combined solution to their customers. This is an okay approach for now but not a great one given that different DSP's give differing results and hence marketers prefer not to stick with just one and use many depending on campaign objectives, inventory qualities and  win rates. Also DSP's are now vertical specific and hence more and more DMPs vendors wanting to be platform agnostic. 

Why is Google doing this? There is some merit to Google's point of view. With the ad technology expanding every day, the number of pixels placed on the publisher's inventory are huge and it is difficult to figure out the pixels resulting in data leak. Google in its bid to curb the data leak across its inventory has decided to ban all the third party pixels. While the intentions are good, this has some undesirable effects too. And the worst ones of these will be for the Google itself as publishers will start shying away from putting their inventories through adsense. 

In the end, Google will have to come up with a solution which can identify and certify certain pixels. DMPs give brands a chance to trust the digital channels and result in a bigger and healthier ecosystem and that is something that Google is a pioneer of.