Google Needs a New Vision for Adtech

In HBO’s Succession, a PR team decides the right message for its scandal-ridden media company is “We hear you.” Then it’s revealed their Alexa-like device has literally been listening to consumers. The attempted fix is the awkward “We hear for you.”

It’s a parody of tech’s tone-deaf relationship with users — but also a fitting analogy for Google’s stance in adtech these last five years.

Since GDPR in 2018, Google’s posture toward the ecosystem, centered on Privacy Sandbox, has been: We hear you. Google tried to position itself as the benevolent intermediary, listening to feedback as it slowly dismantled third-party cookies.

Did this posture help? I don’t think so.

“We hear you” is a bad strategy for a dominant platform. It attempts to create a perception of collaboration, but all the would-be collaborators assume Google will ultimately do whatever it wants. This communications strategy has not earned trust.

All you need to do to see how Google’s Privacy Sandbox-centric approach to adtech has gone over is to look at the response:

• Regulators want to break the company up.

• The press is hostile.

• The industry is even more hostile.

Everyone in adtech wants to be positioned in opposition to Google. That tells you what you need to know.

This isn’t a critique of individual Googlers. I get that Google has to consider global complexity at a scale no other adtech company does. But it was still a mistake to center its relationship with the open web on privacy — and then to approach privacy changes in a drawn-out, oscillatory manner.

Apple’s approach to privacy changes — swift, unapologetic, and clear — would’ve served Google better. Instead, Google dragged the industry through five years of policy limbo, only to kick cookie deprecation back to consumers. Meanwhile, nobody seems to think Topics API will solve anything.

Luckily for Google, the privacy era is over.

Privacy still matters, but it’s now baseline. Everyone just assumes respect for privacy regulations and preparations for a post-cookie era should be baked into adtech products. But privacy is no longer driving industry conversation. AI is.

And AI is where Google can win. Its real contribution to adtech over the past few years isn’t privacy policy — it’s Performance Max. Yes, PMax has transparency issues. But it’s also one of the most paradigm-shifting products in the market. It represents the future of automated media buying: the “just give me the outcomes I want” machine. That’s why everyone talks about it.

Google should go all in on performance and AI — its actual strengths. Talk less about Sandbox as a privacy initiative. Talk more about how it, and the rest of Google’s stack, delivers outcomes: greater performance for advertisers and, if Google wants to keep serving this market, more revenue for publishers.

There are three things that matter in adtech right now: AI, performance, and CTV. Google has a major stake in all three. And, if they want to enable performance on the open web, they are in a unique position, given their resources, to use AI to do so.

That’s the narrative Google should lead. Not “We hear you.” Not privacy theater.

Driving performance at scale through AI innovation — a rising tide that will lift all boats.

In other words, it’s not Privacy Sandbox. It’s Sandbox. 

Drop the “privacy.” It’s cleaner.