Google’s move from cohorts to topics will not be enough to get most regulators off their case, Australian media company director Robert Whitehead says.
While Topics is seen as an improvement over FLoC – which was an improvement over today’s third-party cookie ecosystem – on regulatory and privacy fronts, Whitehead says the announcement will not appease most regulators.
“This move from cohorts to topics will not be enough to get most regulators off the Google case. It still strengthens Google’s hold on data, even though there are several thousand fewer topics envisaged than cohorts,” he says.
“Privacy as a core proposition is a movement that isn’t going away.”
INMA executive director and chief executive Earl Wilkinson says Google’s abandonment of FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) as a replacement for tracking cookies and the introduction of the Topics API is “consistent with the company’s belief that the browser holds the keys to how interest-based targetting will work in the future.”
He says the move could bring certainty back to the advertising ecosystem, and “cool the waters of discontent among regulators”.
He says publishers that have invested in first-party data strategies may have an enhanced competitive advantage, depending on how well developed their audience cohorts are.
Wilkinson says Topics API is a new system for interest-based advertising, working by by identifying five of a person’s interests, or topics in a past week, identified from a list of about 350. The Chrome browser stores these interests for three weeks, and then deletes them.
When someone visits a website, the Topics API will show the site and advertising partners three interests… one topic from each of the past three weeks.
The timetable for phasing out third-party cookies for Topics remains the same as for FLoC – late 2023.
INMA’s Smart Data Initiative lead Ariane Bernard (pictured) says the announcement still centres on browser and interest-based targeting. “Google isn’t backtracking on its general approach to replacing cookies,” she says.
“The company is keeping within similar lines of what it previously conceptualised. This is about the Chrome browser and interest-based targeting.”
Topics will make targetting fuzzier, proposing only a random slice of a browser’s observed top topics of interest. “FLoC schematically would have made targetting fuzzy, and users harder to identify by describing a person as part of a group,” she says.
“The approach would have been to be as descriptive of a user’s profile as possible but fuzzy on who they were. Topics would do this by subtracting part of the picture that makes the user’s interests, rather than only focussing on identity.”
She said publishers may be uncomfortable if Google is “too successful” at making targeting fuzzy because this likely will be done at the expense of CPMs. “This is because what Google is trying to do here is to approach same-or-better ad effectiveness with methods that conceptually are like putting a light piece of cloth on the eyes of the sharpshooter.”