Just a few months ago, the 2020s loomed as a decade of significant transformation for the advertising industry. Less than two years after the European Union implemented the GDPR to address consumer concerns about access to personal data, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on Jan. 1, leaving brands, ad tech vendors and publishers scrambling to figure out what they need to do to comply. Then, a couple of weeks later, Google announced that its Chrome web browser, following similar moves by Safari and Firefox, would eliminate cookies by January 2022, further complicating how, in the not-too-distant future, digital advertising would reach customers without access to the third-party data that had become the standard for programmatic initiatives.

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