10 Adtech Companies That Are Trying to Preserve Ad Targeting and Measurement

  • Privacy policies from tech giants like Apple have taken a heavy toll on the ad industry’s revenue.
  • New laws in Europe and the US, and coming restrictions from Google, will soon make an even bigger impact.
  • But some new tech promises to restore digital advertising’s targeting and measurement capabilities.

The digital ad industry is scrambling as consumer anti-tracking policies from big tech companies like Google and Apple and privacy regulations across the world have already started to wipe out ad revenue.

McKinsey has said that the publishers rely on targeted ads for 80% of their revenue. By one estimate, Apple’s 2021 app tracking privacy change alone was expected to erase $16 billion in revenue from the world’s biggest digital ad companies last year.

The industry is racing to invent new tech that can help preserve online advertising. But that’s easier said than done, as even Google has failed so far to figure out how to target and measure digital ads in a way that also respects consumer privacy.

“As every year progresses, it’s much more of an existential issue for the ad industry than the year prior,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, an ad industry trade group. Two of the IAB Tech Lab’s biggest priorities for 2023 are meant to figure out how digital advertising can thrive while being respectful of consumer privacy. “Privacy will be the issue of our time for the next five years,” Katsur added.

The ad industry has pinned its hopes on three types of solutions to solve the loss of cookies online, according to multiple experts.

The first are contextual solutions, which let advertisers find people based on the content they’ve consumed online. A food brand, for example, can target ads at people reading an online recipe.

Second are cleanrooms, which allow two or more companies to use each other’s data, while allowing each company to  control which parts of their data can be shared. So a car manufacturer might be able to find customers in-market for an electric vehicle on a publisher’s website and target them with ads. 

And the third type of technology are identifiers, which mimic the function of the third-party cookie. However, tech giants like Google and Apple are staunchly against these identifiers. 

As urgency rises, the companies that provide these tools are locked in tight competition. They must also work to convince the publishing community that these technologies will benefit them and keep on the right side of global privacy legislation.

The following is an alphabetized list of companies that provide one or more of the technologies that advertisers hope will save the industry’s revenue. These companies were selected based on Insider’s own reporting, input from ad industry experts, and data from Sincera, an analytics company that tracks which adtech companies are most used in the industry. 

This list does not include the big tech companies like Google and Amazon. These so-called walled gardens have solutions that are mostly used to support ad buying in their own ecosystems, rather than the broader internet.

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