Over the last few weeks, Google has announced a major crackdown on third parties measuring its advertising. This is one of several recent moves by the new media giants that change the dynamics of the digital ad industry, creating a shift in the balance of power between publishers, media agencies and data sellers. It’s important that advertisers understand these changes now so they can ensure they retain control over their view of how their content is working.
The change is this: from now on, third party data companies will not be allowed to track the performance of ads running on the Google Display Network. In the past this was done by inserting code, known as tracking pixels, into the ad placement which would register impressions, clicks and other information. The change in the rules means that now only the companies executing the ad buy will be able to insert these tracking pixels. This means performance data will only be available to clients from the companies who bid for impressions, and from Google, who sell them.
This change effectively cuts out a lot of companies who market themselves as 'third-party' data platforms: providers of independent campaign measurement, such as BlueKai, i-Behavior and Lotame, who rely heavily on these third-party pixels to generate the data they sell to marketers.
Although this only affects the Google Display Network for now, it is one of a number of strategic moves by large digital publishers, which together add up to a land-grab. Publishers are waking up to the fact that their data is a commercial asset, not just the exhaust fumes of their sales operations. Google, Facebook with their relaunched Atlas advertising platform, and Apple with their iAd platform, are aggressively moving towards a 'cookie-less' future where they are the sole gatekeepers of access to data about the performance of ads running on their network. Imagine the TV advertising industry without independent measurement of audience ratings, and you will have some idea of why marketers are rightly concerned.
Undoubtedly some third-party data platforms can be opaque about how their data is collected and calculated, where it is stored, and how it is re-sold. Seen from this point of view, Google is simply cleaning up the market, making sure that information about the performance of Google ads possess Google's own quality standard.
But marketers, as the buyers of advertising, should be able to inspect the performance of that advertising at a granular level, just as any investor should be able to audit his or her portfolio. The cookie-less future signalled by recent changes contain a clear risk of publishers and ad-tech companies making their own homework. There needs to be independent oversight of this data to ensure that those who own the data don’t regulate it too.
A future where all content performance measurement is first-party (provided by the channels themselves, not external data collectors) looks likely, even inevitable. Marketers and their media agencies should be preparing for this now. Larger marketing organisations with bigger media budgets should be negotiating hard with publishers to secure granular access to performance data, so they can mine their data for the metrics that matter, not just the aggregated metrics that publishers or ad-tech providers want them to see. Smaller brands with less clout should still be vocal, working with their media agencies, with regulators and with industry bodies to make sure their concerns are known. Publishers will respond to commercial pressure from buyers who insist that data should be auditable.
As the industry moves towards programmatic media buying, advertisers need to measure more, not less, so they can take full advantage of performance data and make their content work harder, faster. They will need to drive a hard bargain with publishers to make this happen.
By Alex Steer, head of product and analytics at Fabric.
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