Working in a shifting ads ecosystem
Working as a Solutions Engineer
The Solutions Engineering role at Facebook is an interesting one. It sits at the intersection of business consultancy, software engineering, product management, and because it is Facebook, also at a crossroads of a number of privacy, policy, and legal considerations. Because of this unique positioning, we get a lot of remit to work on interesting problems end-end, from understanding there’s an issue as well as defining and building solutions for those issues.
In this post I am going to provide some insight into the work that we’re doing in Solutions Engineering with advertiser and developer bodies to shape the future of digital advertising.
Ecosystem shifts
If you are familiar with the ad tech industry, you’ll know that things are shifting rapidly. The current way of running digital “performance advertising” requires large amounts of data which will be consumed by machine learning algorithms, from which we can predict the most relevant advertisement, for a given user, at a given moment in time. In the early days of web advertising, some of you may remember the totally irrelevant “banner ads” visible on websites. The goal of performance advertising is to replace those ads with something actually relevant for the user.
In principle this all sounds fine, but in terms of how this is implemented today, a number of technologies are used that ultimately result in opaque actions happening on the web and in mobile apps that users may not be fully aware of.
In recent years we have seen shifts in the legislative landscape to introduce new laws such as GDPR in the EU, CCPA in California, and LGPD in Brazil. All of these laws stipulate that users must be given choices on how their data is used, and this is often implemented as pop up prompts on websites.
We’re also seeing shifts from big tech companies, who control the browser and mobile OS platforms through which many users consume digital content. The most recent example of this is App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14, and we can expect more from the continuing evolution of the privacy landscape.
All of this means that digital advertisers are having to reconsider how to approach “performance advertising”. Some of their use cases are completely legitimate, for example measuring if your advertisement actually resulted in user action — this allows an advertiser to calculate the “return on ad spend” for a given ad. Another common use case is a user making a choice to not be advertised to; the advertiser then needs to somehow inform the advertising network of this choice so that the user does not see ads they asked to not see.
Facebook and the Solutions Engineering team have been engaged in conversations through W3C to drive forward proposals and improve awareness of these advertiser needs. To date, measurement focussed proposals such as Private Click Measurement and the Conversion Measurement API have been discussed. We have a number of gaps still though, which will all ideally have solutions to allow for businesses to continue to advertise effectively and reach new and existing customers in an increasingly digital world.
We will continue to work with W3C, and other advertiser bodies like the World Federation of Advertisers and the International Advertising Bureau to explore new technologies and further support for these use cases.
In summary
This is an exciting time to be working in advertising. We have an opportunity to shift advertising to a more private and user-centric model alongside the interesting software engineering challenges of maximising advertising performance within those privacy constraints. The Solutions Engineering team plays a key role in shaping that future.
