Both sides of the coin: a rounded perspective on Ad Tech in 2026

Joe Jackson (0:00)

Welcome to the sixth episode of the Ad Tech Podcast. We have not been decommissioned yet, and I've got our new haircut, because I'm sure everyone is caring about that kind of thing.

We have a wonderful interview with someone I used to work quite closely with, and someone who is now in the kind of frontier of the DSP world, Luca Filardo. But before that, we're gonna have our usual new session. I think we're gonna focus on maybe one topic today, and as usual, we're relying heavily on the knowledge of Joe Jackson. Oh, God. I mean, that's a lot of pressure, especially for a topic that I'll admit is...

This one's pretty technical.

Alex (0:38)

Me too. Me too, but important, right? Tell us what it is, Joe.

Joe Jackson (0:41)

So, essentially, Apple recently updated iOS, iOS 27, and as part of that, they made some changes to Safari, where they have... Well, it seems as though the intention is to try and block some of the kind of identity solutions that are on the market, but it seems as though they have potentially perhaps blocked one or two vendors that they didn't intend to.

Alex (1:04)

Do we know that? We don't know, but yeah.

Joe Jackson (1:06)

Exactly. So, seemingly, some of these changes are going to be reversed in the next update, in 27.2, which I think comes out at the end of the month, but certainly, I mean, we're talking a month and a bit with publishers, essentially, losing traffic, losing CPMs from any kind of user using an iOS device, which is just a tad problematic.

Alex (1:29)

And is that across all the browsers on an iOS device? Yes.

Joe Jackson (1:33)

I believe it changes across geographies because there were some areas where there's been legislative attempts in order to make sure that, essentially, Apple has to let browsers run isolated from their own software. Certainly, in some of the major GOs, yes, it will be any browser on any iOS device, which is a hell of a lot of users. I suppose this is also, I guess, quite a few years ago now, the Safari third-party cookie component was deprecated. So I guess this is almost maybe in Apple's view, the kind of continuation of that or the, I guess, the next phase.

Alex (2:12)

The iteration of it, yeah.

Joe Jackson (2:14)

Yeah, I mean, they've made their stance pretty clear. I mean, it's pretty much them and Firefox, they are very much the privacy-friendly browsers that won the market.

But this is definitely a step that people didn't quite anticipate. It's not one that they were particularly transparent about.

Alex (2:28)

Yeah, none of the kind of industry consultations you might see with other players, none of the kind of ramping up, yeah, it's come out of the blue, right?

Joe Jackson (2:35)

And it's just been like another very clear example of the slightly tenuous position that our industry and especially publishers find ourselves in, where we almost have this somewhat like honor system that works, where we are kind of faithful that some of the big device manufacturers or operating system creators of the world choose to let these systems play out. And this is just kind of an example of when somebody decides to turn off one of the valves. So in terms of the valves, have they been switched as of now? And it's kind of this is in market as such or out of market, I suppose, in the case of being able to utilize some of these ID solutions. Is it currently until that iteration comes out?

Alex (3:16)

No, it's now, right?

Joe Jackson (3:18)

Yeah, it's now. I mean, fortunately, you can be thankful for, I guess, human laziness and that only a very small fraction of people have actually updated.

Alex (3:27)

Look at my phone, I'm like, how many behind am I?

Joe Jackson (3:29)

Like, it's terrible. I'm probably on iOS 2 or something.

Alex (3:32)

You weren't born in iOS 2

Joe Jackson (3:36)

So thankfully, that has sort of put a bit of a limiter on the impact thus far. And while they're going to be reverting some of the changes that perhaps they didn't anticipate, certainly some of the various ID solutions that are on the market are going to remain blocked. And so that is going to be a kind of permanent impact of this. So this potentially already for publishers is, I guess, digging fairly deep.

Is there a kind of future facing solution that, irregardless of if an update sort of makes a change so that they can be reintroduced, is there anything that is out there which potentially can solve this for the future? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, this is obviously the ability of a company like Apple to make a change that has this impact. It's very dependent on many of the ad tech processes happening within the browser, within Safari, something that they have direct control over. And so, any kind of solution that takes the advertising process and puts it server side is obviously going to be very impactful in terms of... The control, right? In terms of making sure publishers have more control. And I mean, there have been a few examples of this throughout history. There are a few solutions on the market that are paid, but obviously, this has turned a lot of people's attention to IAB Tech Lab's Trusted Server Initiative, which they announced sort of early last year, but it's kind of been slowly gaining momentum. This kind of seems to be the...