The Advertising Privacy Balance

Mozilla and Adtech are not a natural combination. Best known as the developer of the Firefox browser, Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to campaigning for an open and freely accessible internet. That mission has led to extensive campaigns around privacy, including building privacy protection and anti-tracking technologies into Firefox. Yet, last week, they acquired a small adtech startup called Anonym. It's an acquisition that surprised everyone, particularly given that Anonym's founders used to work for Meta.

Mozilla are far from the first privacy-focused vendor to enter the adtech space. Privacy and security are major selling points for Apple, who have long had an advertising division as well. Meanwhile, the Brave web browser and search engine pitch themselves as the most private and security-conscious browser, even though they have built-in advertising features. Privacy advocates often speak of a trade-off between advertising and privacy that all three companies reject.

Trade-offs

Both advertisers and ad platforms rely on access to personal information. Advertisers use end to end tracking to report on the effectiveness of their ads, ideally beyond conversion and through to the point of sale. While ad platforms use personal data to target programmatic advertising towards the right audiences, including by tracking third party web activity to build cookie pools and interest profiles.

The consumer backlash against such pervasive online tracking has been fierce, resulting in the spread of GDPR-inspired privacy laws and the impending death of third-party cookies. Adblockers are commonly used among many demographics, while most browsers have some form of anti-tracking protection built in. Both advertisers and adtech vendors now need to consider the impact of data protection on the success of their campaigns, as well as their ability to measure results. Marketers can still enjoy the benefits of both personalisation and end-to-end reporting. They just need to be much more clever about how they achieve it.

Technology

Anonym, the adtech company just purchased by Mozilla, offers a relevant example. Anonym is effectively a data clean room vendor. They provide a GDPR-compliant mechanism to match first-party customer data to ad platform audience profiles, allowing for personalised advertising but without needing to share any PII with third parties. In addition, they leverage machine learning to automate both audience selection and conversion measurement, ensuring that campaign results can be collected from the ad platforms they support and shared back with the original advertiser in a usable format.

As with most adtech solutions, Anonym is primarily interested in B2C use cases. However, the techniques they use are still relevant to B2B marketers. There has been a proliferation of B2B focused advertising platforms in recent years, primarily driven by the growth of ABM and account-based advertising. Many organisations have subsequently decided that account-level targeting is the safest way to comply with privacy obligations. That isn't necessarily true though. There are many different ways of architecting a privacy-compliant martech solution, and new technologies are increasing those possibilities all the time.