Top 4 Programmatic Advertising and AdTech Themes of 2020

Every December, the industry fills up with predictions articles — earnest forecasts about what the coming year will bring. Revisiting those pieces twelve months later is always instructive, sometimes humbling.

Looking back at 2020 predictions published in late 2019, a handful held up reasonably well. But nobody called the global health pandemic that would shrink ad spend, trigger mass layoffs and furloughs, and stall the growth of fast-evolving channels like DOOH.

That alone is a reminder that a new year can bring almost anything.

With 2020 firmly in the rearview mirror, here's a look at the four themes that defined programmatic advertising and AdTech over the course of the year.

Privacy and the Walled Gardens of Apple and Google

Privacy in programmatic advertising has been a live issue for more than five years. Laws like the EU's GDPR, the proposed ePrivacy Regulation, California's CCPA, and Brazil's LGPD dominated headlines throughout that stretch. But by 2020, the privacy moves being made inside Apple and Google's platforms were generating more immediate industry disruption than any piece of legislation.

Google's Privacy Changes

Chrome Announces Third-Party Cookie Deprecation by 2022

The first signal that Chrome was getting serious about user privacy came in May 2019, when Google announced new features aimed at giving users more transparency and control over personalized advertising.

That autumn, Chrome followed up by announcing changes to how it handles third-party cookies through a new attribute called SameSite, introduced in October 2019.

The bigger announcement came in January 2020: Chrome declared it would shut off support for third-party cookies entirely by 2022 — a move that sent ripples across every corner of the programmatic ecosystem.

Further reading on Chrome's cookie deprecation

• Google, You Finally Really Did It — AdExchanger
• Google Chrome Will Phase Out Third-Party Cookies by 2022 — AdWeek
• Publishers Sense Opportunity As Chrome Drops Third-Party Cookies — AdExchanger
• How publishers are planning for the end of the third-party cookie — Digiday

Chrome's Privacy Sandbox

Google first announced the Privacy Sandbox initiative in August 2019, framing it as a way to keep the web commercially viable while significantly reducing individual tracking.

Chrome's Privacy Sandbox is essentially a suite of technical proposals designed to support core advertising functions — ad targeting, measurement, and fraud prevention — without identifying users at an individual level. The analogy to security sandboxing is deliberate: these processes would run in a constrained environment, sharply different from how ad tech operates today.

The initiative has three main components:

• Replacing cross-site tracking mechanisms currently powered by third-party cookies
• Phasing out third-party cookies through the SameSite separation approach, followed by full deprecation
• Mitigating workarounds, particularly fingerprinting

Privacy Sandbox proposals continue to be debated within the W3C Business Group, and timelines for when individual APIs will be finalized remain in flux.

Further reading on Privacy Sandbox

• What's In Google's Privacy Sandbox? Nothing, For Now — AdExchanger
• What Is Google's Privacy Sandbox? — AdMonsters
• WTF is Google's Privacy Sandbox? — Digiday

Apple's Privacy Changes

Apple's privacy moves in Safari and iOS have accumulated steadily over several years. The company introduced Content Blockers in iOS 9, letting users install third-party apps capable of blocking ads, tracking scripts, and page-slowing elements in Safari.

In September 2017, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari — a machine-learning-based feature designed to prevent cross-site tracking by limiting how third-party cookies can be used. Additional ITP updates arrived in 2020, progressively tightening restrictions.

The real headline, though, came in June 2020.

Apple Announces Changes to IDFA

At its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2020, Apple unveiled a series of privacy updates coming in iOS 14 that effectively upended the foundations of in-app mobile advertising and measurement.

The central element is the Apple IDFA — identifier for advertisers — a string of numbers and letters assigned to Apple devices including iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. AdTech platforms and mobile measurement partners (MMPs) rely on the IDFA to identify users across apps, enable targeted advertising, run frequency capping, measure campaign performance, and attribute installs to specific impressions or clicks.

An IDFA looks something like this:

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The iOS 14 changes introduced three significant shifts:

IDFA access: Before accessing a user's IDFA and sharing it with AdTech or MMP partners, app developers must ask for explicit permission. Users can only be prompted once per install, via a standardized system prompt.

Privacy information in the App Store: App developers are required to self-report their data collection and privacy practices, displayed directly on the app's product page.

Approximate location: Users can choose to share precise location data or opt to share only an approximate location.

Opt in message iOS 14

Example of the permission prompt users will see when an app developer requests access to their IDFA.

Most of the iOS 14 privacy updates launched in September 2020 as scheduled, but the IDFA-specific changes were pushed back to early 2021 — giving the industry a short reprieve to prepare.

Further reading on IDFA changes

• 15 minutes w/ Beeswax: Impact of IDFA Opt-In On Online Advertising — Beeswax
• The DeanBeat: What's at stake in Apple's potentially apocalyptic IDFA changes — VentureBeat
• Tips From The Trenches: Sustainable App Publishing In A Post-IDFA World — AdExchanger

Identity in Web, Mobile, and CTV/OTT Environments

Programmatic advertising is entering a second era of identity — and this one looks very different from the first.

The first era emerged alongside real-time bidding (RTB). Third-party cookies let advertisers identify individual users across websites, enabling behavioural targeting, retargeting, frequency capping, and attribution. The infrastructure was built largely by AdTech innovation.

The second era is being defined not by innovation but by privacy. Over the past five years, a combination of forces has been steadily narrowing the availability of cross-site identifiers: GDPR and similar laws, privacy-driven changes in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, and now Apple's IDFA restrictions on mobile. The direction of travel is clear, even if the ultimate destination remains uncertain.

But privacy isn't identity's only structural challenge. CTV and OTT channels — attracting growing shares of advertising budgets — currently have no standard cross-platform identity mechanism. That gap needs to close as dollars continue shifting into these environments.

Identity will likely be one of the most consequential technical and commercial battlegrounds in programmatic advertising over the next decade.

Further reading on identity

• How to approach a long-term identity strategy, minus third-party cookies — Digiday
• Can Email Be The Next Big Online Identifier? — AdExchanger
• The Trade Desk is building version 2.0 of its unified ID — AdWeek
• Mobile Ad Tech Companies Try To Adapt To Likely Loss Of Apple's IDFA — AdExchanger
• Post-Cookie World: How Does the Demise of the Cookie Affect Advertisers and Publishers? — ExchangeWire
• Surge In CTV Viewing Creates New Urgency To Solve Identity — AdExchanger
• Connected TV is searching for its identity and it's closer than you think — AdNews

Antitrust Investigations into GAFA

Antitrust scrutiny of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon ran as a persistent undercurrent throughout 2020. For the programmatic advertising industry, the cases targeting Google's ad business are the most directly relevant.

Google has faced antitrust scrutiny before, but 2020 brought an unusual concentration of formal actions. The US House Judiciary's subcommittee on antitrust examined Google's market power, the Texas Attorney General launched a separate probe, and the Department of Justice filed a formal antitrust lawsuit. Each focused on different aspects of Google's dominance, but Google's advertising stack featured prominently across all of them.

How these cases ultimately resolve remains an open question. A widely held view inside the programmatic industry is that some form of forced restructuring of Google's ad business is a real possibility.

Further reading on antitrust

• Google sued by DOJ in antitrust case over search dominance — CNBC
• Google's antitrust battles: Here's what you need to know — CNET
• Texas attorney general, Google's new competition cop, says everything is 'on the table' — The Washington Post

COVID-19 and Ad Spend

No 2020 retrospective is complete without acknowledging the pandemic.

When COVID-19 took hold globally, the programmatic advertising industry felt the impact quickly — ad budgets froze, layoffs and furloughs spread across the sector, and the uncertainty of the early months made any forward planning difficult.

Not every segment contracted, however. Companies operating in gaming and CTV/OTT actually recorded growth over the course of the year, benefiting from sharp increases in time spent at home. Overall, the industry hadn't fully recovered by year end, but conditions by late 2020 pointed toward a meaningful rebound heading into 2021.

Looking Ahead

The themes above — privacy infrastructure, the identity transition, antitrust pressure on the major platforms, and the economic disruption from COVID — didn't resolve when the calendar turned. If anything, they carried more momentum into 2021 than they had at the start of 2020.

As 2020 demonstrated, the year rarely goes where the predictions say it will. The structural issues are predictable; the curveballs, by definition, are not.