Criteo’s Gleason: Privacy Sandbox Reimagines Open Web Currency

The deprecation of third-party cookies and emergence of new privacy technologies like Google’s Privacy Sandbox will significantly disrupt the historic “currency” by which advertising on the open web is traded.

That is the view of Criteo’s global chief revenue officer Brian Gleason, who says the industry now needs to come together to rethink how it enables and measures advertising outside of walled gardens.

“The cookie has been the currency in which the open web is traded since inception,” Gleason says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “When the currency changes, that creates significant disruption to the way that we measure things.”

Criteo, whose technology powers advertising for brands, retailers and publishers, has put forward its own proposals for technologies it thinks can continue enabling relevant advertising in the new era.

“In this next evolution, we have to certainly listen to consumers and think about privacy in a privacy-safe world and evolve our business in a new way to think about how we show proof to brands who want to advertise or utilize the open web,” Gleason says.

He says Criteo chief product officer Todd Parsons has published “excellent papers” on the company’s “three-prong addressable approach” to the challenge.

Our CPO, Todd Parsons, clears up confusion on #PrivacySandbox testing — what’s being tested, when, and its implications for addressable advertising: https://t.co/zJ41jZZHUf pic.twitter.com/2ujV40cqEP

— Criteo (@criteo) March 12, 2024

But Gleason also thinks the industry at large must come together to hammer out new mechanisms, if it wants to support a vibrant open internet.

“There’s an obligation, I think, from everybody in this ecosystem to evolve and to outline this next chapter,” he says.

“How do we make sure, then, that we bring everybody along with us – the publishers, because everybody believes in the open web to make sure that we have free content, great journalism that we can go to, and then to make sure that we bring agencies as well.”

Despite the challenges, however, Gleason is excited by the growth of “commerce media”, the ability to bring advertising right to the point of purchase.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything as exciting as what commerce media (is),” Gleason enthuses. “Forever, we’ve always wanted to get closer to the transaction. We wanted to see how well our advertising performed.

“It is 100% focused about bringing advertising into shopping environments, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the way that retailers are bringing these opportunities to light with brands who are spending more and more in this space, agencies who are building new practices around this.”

This video was produced at the LUMA Partner DMS 2024.