Welcome to Birdwatching, where we keep track of all the latest updates related to the avian-themed acronyms of the cookieless advertising world.

DeepIntent is building healthcare advertising solutions for the future, and as we’re all aware, the future — or more specifically, the future as of 2023 — will be cookieless. DeepIntent has been mostly cookieless since 2019, and having developed our own cookieless ID graph, my team makes it a point to stay in the know about the cookie deprecation timeline, how other companies are advancing their cookieless advertising efforts, and what other cookieless alternatives will emerge in the coming years. Each month, we’ll compile those insights here, so you too can be aware of what awaits us in the cookieless future.

This month, Technical Product Manager Tom Robinson provides an overview of the MaCAW proposal, while spotlighting some of the top headlines related to privacy and identity.

The “Bird” of the Month

July’s bird of the month is MaCAW, a.k.a. “Multi-party Computation of Ads on the Web,” which we can think of as an add-on to PARAKEET.

MaCAW is a generic ad serving flow that retains the measurable privacy guarantees introduced in PARAKEET (a.k.a. “Private and Anonymized Requests for Ads that Keep Efficacy and Enhance Transparency”) and extends the functionality with support for more comprehensive and accurate ad targeting without revealing additional user information to the ad services.

Where PARAKEET lays the foundation, MaCAW extends that functionality to include bid models, brand safety checks, a ranking function, and publisher controls.

Additionally in this model, the ad services do not need to share bid models, model parameters, or auction functions with the browser service. These are often considered confidential intellectual property, and reduce the level of trust they need to extend to the browser service as a result.

What’s our take on it? MaCAW continues the excellent work done in PARAKEET to meet the challenges that marketers face today. It’s a thoughtful extension of an already thoughtful proposal.

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top headlines from the last month.

• This AdExchanger article argues that the next phases of ad tech is about consent, not cookies.
• New research from Adform shows that first-party IDs outperform third-party IDs in programmatic ad campaigns.
• Adweek published a guide for marketers on the key differences between the statewide privacy laws.