With privacy being one of the hottest topics in the online ad industry in 2022, publishers may find it hard to keep track of all newest trends in this niche, hence successfully meet their audience’s and Demand partners’ changing requirements. 

In spite of Google’s decision to postpone the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome until 2024, privacy remains in the limelight of most discussions in the online ad community in 2022.  Unfortunately, the continuously evolving privacy laws and regulations in various parts of the words and the increasingly growing number of newly-introduced audience addressability initiatives, most of which still lack either interoperability, or efficacy (or both), often leave publishers doubtful about how to adjust their first-party data strategies to the ever-changing digital ad landscape. 

Check out the AdPlayer.Pro’s guide to some of the hottest privacy-related buzzwords that publishers need to keep track of in Q4 2022. 

Data Clean Rooms

With some obvious reasons behind this, a concept of data clean rooms has become one of the trendiest topics in the digital advertising industry over the past months. 

Namely, one of such major reasons was the release of IAB Tech Lab’s Seller Defined Audiences specification, which is what actually puts data clean rooms into practice, helping publishers to monetize their first-party data more effectively, while keeping the data itself secure across the entire programmatic supply chain.

The bad news is, even though using a data clean room obviously offers a number of advantages (whether it’s a large walled garden, or a multi-platform solution), the injection process may take time. 

Pro tip! Leverage direct partnerships with top-tier advertisers in one or several key verticals, which drive maximum traffic and audience engagement on your digital properties, by enabling the injection of your first-party data in the data clean room tech solutions they’re currently utilizing, via PMP deals. 

Privacy Enhancing Technologies

While the IAB Tech Lab’s PETs working group has been developing a unified approach (and framework) to integrate a variety of privacy-enhancing technologies across the online advertising ecosystem for many months now, their real-life use is still in its infancy.

And while most experts agree the future of PETs is inevitably bright in the long run, the entire niche is far from developing its “gold standard” just yet. 

Namely, some of the existing tech solutions (e.g. trusted execution environments) may still imply data security issues, the other ones (e.g. on-device learning/data analysis) are often lacking scalability, or require significant financial resources for their proper implementation (e.g. an advanced cybersecurity platform, complex MPC (multi-party computation) tech, etc.).

Pro tip! Don’t rush into the development and implementation of any PETs right away, rather keep an open mind on what your top-priority Demand partners have in the works, then proceed to exploring opportunities on whether/how these can be incorporated into your existing monetization strategy. 

Homomorphic encryption

Even though the concept of fully homomorphic encryption (or short: FHE), which implies the technical ability to compute on the encrypted data without its decryption, is nothing new, and its potential use in the digital advertising industry could benefit all parties, the absence of a unified homomorphic encryption standardization and the obvious complexity of deployment makes it somewhat an unattainable goal for most companies on the market even today.

However, the buzz around FHE has become louder in 2022, with some companies claiming they’ve already achieved essential advances in this respect, so the evolution in this niche may be accelerating further on. 

Pro tip! Since the newly-emerged FHE tech vendors aren’t sharing their technical (e.g. API) documentation, or any other technical details yet, it’s hard to evaluate whether their solutions could be really efficient after all. In this respect, your best choice would probably be to stay tuned for news updates, yet take care of the more urgent privacy-related tasks for now.