So, let’s hit the pause button, catch our breath, and dig deep into what the heck this authenticated web is all about — and why it’s worth our attention, or maybe not.

What is the authenticated web?

It’s anything that makes users verify their identity through a secure process (like logging in with an email) to access content on a site or app.

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Enter: financial media networks.

But what are they, why are they important and why would marketers even care?

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The latest iteration of that reality came out earlier in May when the ANA published the report, “The Acceleration of Principal Media (What Marketers Need to Know),” which tackled the growing practice among agencies of investing in media at non-disclosed prices to then resell to their clients, presumably at a markup to the agency.

The use of principal media is on the rise, notably by the agency holding companies, which are looking for profit wherever they can find it. As Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester puts it, “That’s what’s driving the growth among those agencies that are demonstrating it.”

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In light of the discovery, ad tech execs accused Colossus of tricking advertisers into buying audiences they weren’t trying to target. The claim was that the sell-side platform was changing the user ID attached to an ad impression to make it more appealing to advertisers. Thus, the SSP could charge a higher CPM.

A few terms were thrown around in the report — as well as by digital ad execs debating the impropriety — to describe the alleged misbehavior, including “cookie stuffing,” “ID mis-matching,” “ID spoofing” and “ID stuffing.”

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During a closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in March, a publisher exec, granted anonymity under Chatham House rules, spoke about their growing interest in participating in data collaborations with brands. Data collaborations, often abbreviated to data collabs, put the publisher in a more authoritative position, they said, as well as enabled them to scale up the portion of valuable audiences that advertisers could reach. 

“[Advertisers] want to combine data assets to have a better together story, which allows them to think about ways of taking [the brand’s] first-party data and activating it on an unaddressable or on unfindable users that have historically been left behind,” said the publisher during the town hall. 

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These concerns have made their way to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). But why does the group’s opinion matter so much? Stick around to uncover why it’s key in the whole saga of bidding farewell to third-party cookies.

First up, WTF is the CMA?

The CMA, or Competition and Markets Authority, is essentially the watchdog of the U.K.’s business world. It keeps an eye on mergers, makes sure companies are playing fair and investigates when it smells something fishy in the market. Its job is to keep competition healthy and protect consumers from shady practices.

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And that’s reason enough to unpack what this bundle of U.S. privacy laws might mean for the ad industry at large.

WTF is the APRA?

It would shake things up in advertising by forcing companies to scale down the amount of data they collect on people while also empowering them to manage, correct, and even export their own data. That control would also give them the power to say “no” to targeted ads and the transfer of their own data. Plus, they’d have the option to opt out of algorithms influencing major life decisions for them, like where they live or who they’re able to work for. And of course, there’s a big focus on beefing up security measures to keep everyone’s info safe and sound. Oh and don’t forget about dark patterns; companies would be barred from using these sneaky tactics to sway users away from exercising their newfound rights on privacy settings.

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Shared Storage basically serves as a storage locker within people’s browsers that advertisers, publishers and ad tech firms can use to stash information across sites and to act on that information. For example, an advertiser can use Shared Storage to tally the number of times someone was served a specific ad and cycle in a new ad to serve next, as covered in the video below.

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“Cheap reach” refers to a subset of digital ad inventory that may be often overlooked — literally — and may be a necessary new taxonomy to prevent legitimate publishers from getting caught up in the crackdown on made-for-advertising sites. In the video below, Digiday media editor Kayleigh Barber helps to break down what cheap reach is, why this inventory category was created and why advertisers are not yet scrambling to excise it from their ad buys.

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Passed by Congress in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the law has been a linchpin for protecting online platforms from legal challenges. While the CDA aimed to prevent minors from accessing explicit content, Section 230 created a framework for protecting companies like Google and Facebook from being sued over what people post.

Amid growing concern about user-generated content, Section 230 has found itself increasingly under a microscope. In recent years, U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation to amend Section 230 to curb misinformation and other harmful content, including generative AI. And just last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments about whether Florida and Texas should be allowed to limit how tech companies moderate user-generated content. 

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Many prefer to see ad blocking as a wake-up call that requires a mindset change by publishers and advertisers. Others see yet another tech problem to solve. Enter ad insertion.

Video publishers are feeling the same heat, which is why a handful of ad tech companies are pushing “server-side ad insertion” as way to get the upper hand on ad blockers. Sure, many say that publishers and their ad tech henchmen are doomed to lose any technological arms race, but that’s not going to stop attempts to find a way around ad blockers.

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The video below breaks down the basics of creating a chatbot for the generative AI platform, with Digiday senior media reporter Sara Guaglione explaining why publishers are not necessarily racing to embrace the shiny new toy.

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This emphasis on performance has led some TV network and streaming service owners to offer guarantees based on their ability to deliver against specific business outcomes. As explained in the video below, the ad sellers are not so much pledging to generate a specific outcome count as a relative impact.

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As the ad industry re-evaluates its approach to personal privacy, advertisers are searching for ways to collect data on people without compromising their privacy. One of those alternatives has been called differential privacy, a statistical technique which allows companies to share aggregate data about user habits while protecting individual privacy.

Here’s an explainer on how differential privacy works.

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In a recent study, the global standards body’s Privacy Sandbox taskforce analyzed several of its proposals. It claimed only a handful were fit for purposes, with even fewer members reporting comfort with the provided documentation. 

Hence, it’s clear that better education on Privacy Sandbox’s proposed APIs is needed, and it’s worth asking the question: WTF are Related Website Sets? See the explainer video below by Digiday senior media editor Tim Peterson.

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