Privacy fatigue is setting in after Google’s cookie U-turn. But the search for alternatives hasn’t stopped

For years, privacy was treated as advertising’s great reckoning. The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, Apple’s crackdown on mobile identifiers and the slow death march of third-party cookies in the largest browser — it all painted a picture of a future where platforms would be reined in, marketers would be forced to adapt and users would finally gain some measure of control over their data.

That future never quite arrived.

What followed instead was a slower, stranger drift: enforcement grew spotty. Regulatory efforts stalled and the largest platforms — Google, Meta, Amazon — emerged with even more concentrated power than before. Fines dried up. Reforms got diluted or delayed. And cookie deprecation, once symbolic of the new era, came full circle when Google confirmed it wouldn’t eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome after all.

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Meta’s Threads ads arrive fast, but advertisers move at their own pace

After a mere three months of testing, Meta announced on Wednesday that ads on Threads are now available to all eligible advertisers globally.

While it might seem quick — testing periods can typically take anything from six months to a year prior to an official global launch — the anticipation of when this might drop has lingered since Threads first launched in July 2023.

So what’s on offer and how does it work?

Since Threads is a text-based app, the new image ad placement is in the Threads feed. And as predicted by most advertisers Digiday caught up with during the short testing window, Meta stated that advertisers can access it via the Advantage+ platform whereby advertisers leave it up to Meta’s algorithm to determine where their ads show up, or via manual placements, where marketers purposefully select which placements they want their campaigns to show up in. 

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