The adtech industry is in many ways “apparently a disappointing, dysfunctional one” when it comes to achieving the role of precision marketing and advertising, according to a leading industry lawyer and academic.
Perry Keller, Associate Professor in Media and Information Law, School of Law, King’s College London, said that although third-party cookies were in decline they had given the possibility of precision marketing and advertising through the identification of individual consumers but that “clunkiness” had come at a cost.
“There is a great deal of dysfunction in adtech at the moment, but nonetheless there is this vision which, with 5G and an enhanced Internet of Things backed by ever more powerful artificial intelligence, is still in sight,” he told the Westminster Media Forum.
Current technical limitations would be overcome in the future, but there was also a growing moral case to be made with companies coming under intense scrutiny over privacy and market dominance, with European competition regulators said to be looking closely at Google’s privacy sandbox and advertising practices.
“Some of the adtech industry think that this is going to be a silver lining in that if Google is limited in its abilities to use first-party cookies, and must open its platform more generally, there’ll be opportunities,” he said, adding that it was “highly unlikely” that “we can turn the clock back towards some alternative form of the third-party cookie”.
“Finally, there’s the moral crisis, surveillance, capitalism, and the loss of consumer trust. And I think that is widely apparent that precision marketing and advertising is widely perceived by the public as precision surveillance,” he continued, citing the public response to Facebook’s changes to WhatsApp privacy settings.
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