Google delays telling us all to go FLoC ourselves

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Google extended the timeline it set over a year ago on the end of cookie use allowed in the Chrome browser. Instead of by Q2 of 2022 the new deadline is end of 2023.

Advertisers and their marketing service providers – agencies and the like – are, to put it charitably, disappointed. One industry notable from a multinational CPG called the delay “bullsh**t.” Advertisers’ hands have become well-chaffed from years of wringing over concerns of consumer privacy, protecting the data that comes from transgressing that privacy, and compliance with rules governing that privacy and its protection. Ad tech providers and open web publishers kept their delight muted, but we can assume they privately celebrated what amounts to an ostensible stay of execution.

Why did Google do it?

A few reasons have been put forth in the trades over the last week. Among them has been concerns that Google’s proposed cookie alternative, the FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), doesn’t work as hoped. There is reported to be data leaking from the groupings that could still make individualistic identification possible, a lack of a consent mechanism for audiences to opt in or out, and that the FLoC method of targeting doesn’t yield patterns – and therefore insights – that are any better (and may be worse) than cookies.

I’d like to propose a few others.

Optics

Google doesn’t want to look like a big bad bully, taking its ball away from all the smaller kids at the playground and going home. Giving the rest of the industry time to sort things out says to the world “we are all in this together; we will stand here at the finish line and let you all catch up so that we may cross together in harmony.”

Operational

The FLoC and FLEDGE (which stands for the tortuously opaque “First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment”) hasn’t worked as hoped in early testing. Perhaps Google’s advertising ecosystem requires a form of viscera that the FLoC has yet to provide, holding the whole thing together. The aforementioned claims about not doing a better job at protecting privacy than cookies notwithstanding, it’s possible that the early returns haven’t been good enough for publishers and, therefore, won’t be good enough for advertisers. Google may want to do away with the cookie, but if it can’t find a way to satisfy advertisers’ need to prove performance, advertisers may look elsewhere. This is unlikely, but possible. I have written before that I think Google doesn’t need the kind of targeting specificity that has held primacy in digital advertising for the last 20 years. Maybe they want a little more runway to prove it to advertisers.

Obeisance

Google needs to satisfy a variety of regulating overseers and governments that are looking for privacy compliance on the one hand and be wary of anti-trust scrutiny on the other, because sunsetting the cookie will leave publishers and tech providers out in the cold, substantiating claims that Google holds undue market dominance. Minimizing disruption caused to the advertising economy that cookies have supported for decades means less attention paid to that dominance. The U.K.’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) could have perhaps the biggest role to play outside publishers and advertisers on how Google’s Privacy Sandbox comes together and operates, as well as on its decision to hold off on replacing the cookie with these alternatives. Toeing whichever line the CMA draws will be important to Google keeping the U.K. and, by association, other European countries at bay in any anti-trust pursuits.

Ontological

Imagine a world suddenly devoid of cookies…

After the weeks-long festivals held around the globe celebrating world peace, the end of the surveillance economy, and new-found comity between political parties and their constituencies because the enablement of corrosive click-bait capitalism will have effectively been neutered, then what?

A gazillion links to a bajillion sites are rendered valueless, or of fractional value. Advertising once equipped with some level of data readability will be rendered mundane and data poor.

The ecosystem of publishers dependent on cookies to appear valuable to advertisers and audiences alike become less fiscally viable. The nearly limitless expanses where Google can put ads and send audiences through with a click to roam and feed begin to become smaller and drier. Like shrinking wetlands, there are fewer places for birds to land.

Google relies on a robust ecosystem. The most highly searched and trafficked words and phrases might be celebrities and major news stories, but there’s a lot of money in the vast network of sites participating in AdSense on top of Google’s endemic network. Stop feeding lifeforms further down the food chain the the lifeforms further up have to become more specialized and limited in what they can do to survive and thrive.

I do believe it is a matter of time before Google figures out a way to rely less, or not at all, on that ecosystem. Growing smart TV operating system share will help with that. Maybe then they’ll tell us to FLoC off.