Addressability is back as a headline concern for attendees at this year’s Prebid Summit

When Google U-turned plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome last year, many in ad tech thought the issue of addressability — namely, how large platforms such as web browsers and mobile OS providers can restrict third-party ad targeting — was a conversation left behind in the early 2020s.

However, as most Digiday readers will know, addressability and measurement restrictions soared back to the top of the agenda following Apple’s latest iOS 27, with such discussions taking place on the sidelines of last week’s proceedings.

What’s old is new again

Speakers at this season’s Prebid Summit, held Oct. 13, said the ad tech crowd should expect this trend to continue at industry gatherings for years to come.

Attendees got a glimpse of court-ordered integration proposals between Prebid, a non-profit organization that helps publishers monetize open-source tools, and Google’s ad tech, as part of recent antitrust rulings; AdExchanger first reported the proposals.

Meanwhile, separate discussions tackled the broader issue of publisher monetization in the era of AI, and debated the seeming inevitability of such technologies further entrenching the dominance of the industry’s platforms.

Last week, optimists noted that Apple’s Safari had a relatively small user base, though speakers at the New York City-hosted event forecast more of the same, echoing industry discussions from the early 2020s.

“What we need to worry about is addressability and anonymity,” Alan Chapell of the Monopoly Report said onstage at the summit, noting that the most recent ruling against Google’s ad tech offering, primarily for auction manipulation, was, essentially, last decade’s challenge.

“The future challenge is going to be about addressability,” said Chapell, forecasting that the “room for interpretation” in the latest ruling from Justice Leonie Brinkema meant Google is likely to “claw back” some provisions.

One rule for the open web, another for walled gardens

Elsewhere, or inevitably, the PTSD of Apple’s iOS 27 updates also reared its head on a separate panel, where The Trade Desk’s Ian Meyers, the demand-side platform exec who helped raise awareness of the blocking issue, voiced an innate disadvantage of the open web when it comes to advertisers’ expectations, i.e., a lack of transparency expectations.

“I think transparency is a significant liability,” said Meyers. “This is something that walled gardens don’t have to deal with at the same level, because they’re in charge of reporting back all the [stats and outcomes of an ad campaign].”

He further added, “So while I agree that it’s a huge asset [in terms of a pitch to media buyers], I think it’s often weaponized against the open internet.”

In a separate onstage panel, Permutive CEO Joe Root discussed how publishers are trying to take lessons from Meta’s re-nosing of its ad targeting platform after it too fell foul of Apple’s (often opaque) terms and conditions in the early 2020s.

“What Meta did next is they rebuilt everything on top of their supply-side signals,” Root told attendees. “When you put conversion data in Meta, they correlate it with all of your behaviors across the Meta ecosystem, and they target those behaviors, and they built this incredible outcomes engine off the back of it.”

According to Root, publishers are likewise moving decision-making and audience intelligence onto the supply side, in a move that should assuage concerns around unilateral policy decisions from gatekeepers such as Apple or Google.

More acronyms, less M&A

Of course, in this sub-sector of the industry, acronyms abound and new terms proliferate — to the point where usage regularly outpaces understanding — and because of this, level-setting is often needed. To address this, veteran industry pundits Ari Paparo, a former industry executive turned micro-influencer, and LUMA Partners’ Terry Kawaja took the stage to share their take.

“None of us in this room know anything about AI in the sense of how to figure out how it’s going to manifest,” said Kawaja, the industry’s most widely recognized investment banker, adding that this explains much of buyers’ hesitancy to write checks.

“Because they’re like, ‘Wait a second, is this a capability I need, or is this something the next version of [Anthropic’s] Claude is going to usurp?'” he observed, adding that workflow automation is unlikely to be a differentiator. “Decisioning, coupled with unique [ad targeting] signal, is what will separate the winners from the losers.”

Elsewhere, the duo discussed the seeming emergence of universal buying platforms — such offerings have picked up a variety of monikers, such as “UBPs”, “universal advertising platforms,” or even “universal media platforms” — with some interpreting the recent developments with Amazon’s platform as indicative of this trend.

However, this development didn’t convince the veteran duo, with Kawaja pithily answering Paparo’s question with a variation on an age-old industry credo. “I saw ‘UMP’ [universal media platform], and I thought: ad network,” he quipped.