Earlier this week, Google announced plans to forgo it's previously committed 'FLOC' proposal which was expected to be the centerpiece of its move toward removing 3rd-party cookies from Chrome. The original proposal was announced in 2019 and expected to be finished in 2021. Early in 2021, Google came out and suspended the change for an additional 2 years, until sometime in late 2023. FLOC was a cohort-based solution designed to bucket users into groups that share similar learnings. This would give advertisers some control over who they are targeting and with what products, however it would not allow for individual cookie-based targeting that exists today. The new proposal, called Google Topics, does move further in the direction of being more privacy centric as it only allows for users to be bucketed under 6 'topics of interest' which will then be available for advertisers. These topics instead of being based on purchase behavior, they will be based on site content - not dissimilar to contextual advertising which has seen a resurgence in the past year with so much volatility around 3rd-party cookies. What will be interesting to see is first, will the timeline in 2023 still remain for this industry change - after all, google owns 55% of the display advertising market today. Does this change mean that ad tech companies and media agencies will lose their efficiency even more, thus causing more people to bring dollars through Google's search products? This will be a really interesting development to follow and will surely have huge implications on the online advertising space as a whole.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/google-floc-cookies-chrome-topics/
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