Online ads could soon have a worthy rival to Google

Online advertising is quite common. No website or space on the internet is immune to online ads. When it comes to online advertising, it is evident that Google is the boss. Since the company earns a huge sum of revenue from showing ads. Given this perspective, it appears like it would be quite difficult for any company to compete with Google in this respective category. However, it now looks like that someone is getting prepared to dip their toes in this domain.

Four companies i.e., Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Spain’s Telefónica (Movistar, O2), United Kingdom’s Vodafone, and France’s Orange have declared that together they are going to introduce an advertising venture. These companies will form one new company. The new company will be dealt with separately. Every one of the four companies will have an equal share in the new company. Besides this, the shareholders of the company have formed a supervisory board.

 The participants of this joint venture have issued a statement. The statement sheds light on the main mission of the conglomerate. It mentions that the company will focus on introducing an advertising platform for European users. It further indicates that the venture will comply with the European Union’s stringent online privacy policies for instance the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR.

The joint venture will be using the ad platform built by Vodafone. Since 2022, the platform is under testing by Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone in Germany. It will now be tested for consumers in the native community of France [Orange] and Spain [Telefonica].

The highlights of this technology are as follows:

• Enables users to control how they see ads
• Users can choose to communicate with brands via publishers
• Give consent via a handy privacy portal at any time
• No other stuff is presented to the users except a pseudo-anonymous digital token that cannot be reverse-engineered

Basically, a pseudo-anonymous digital token [can’t be reverse-engineered] points to something that is associated as a substitute for tracking cookies. It is the area where Google has been making efforts to offer any possible solution.  

Besides this, there is much more that is unknown to us about this technology. But it appears that it is going to present tough competition to Google and other advertisers such as Meta in Europe.