Adtech

Back to TMT - Technology, Media & Telecommunications

To understand adtech, you need your lawyers to have market-leading understanding of both technology and advertising and we can offer this expertise. We live and breathe technology with a large team of technology lawyers in the top tier of the legal directories. We also have a highly respected advertising practice, advising brands, traditional and digital advertising agencies, networks and publishers. Beyond this, we have a taskforce of experts from across our technology and advertising practices that are fully immersed in the adtech market specifically. They understand the key issues impacting the sector and advise every day on innovative solutions.

Our top ranked, commercial, corporate disputes and IP lawyers advise a number of key players in the sector, across a number of different stages in the corporate lifecycle, from start-up through scale-up to truly global. We work across all verticals, whether technology platforms, digital agencies, brands or publishers/media owners. This broad experience means that we have a holistic perspective on the market – we understand the key issues impacting the sector from both buy-side and sell-side, allowing us to provide targeted, commercially relevant, practical advice in context.

We have a wealth of experience in all of the above areas. Recent experience includes:

  • drafting and negotiating a complex global media buying deal for a market-leading global brand with a particular focus on ensuring fit-for-purpose terms for the programmatic world;
  • advising a global consumer goods leader on a sophisticated services contract with a key provider of an adtech solution that underpins a new global consumer insight data management platform containing over 1 billion records;
  • advising a leading agency group on several strategic M&A transactions with a total value exceeding £500m;
  • advising companies across the sector, including publishers, agencies and brands on data compliance strategies both relating to the implementation of GDPR and also broader data challenges (whether relating to commercialising existing data through advanced monetisation strategies or considering technical challenges involved in applying the ePrivacy Directive and new PEC regulations to the adtech stack effectively); and
  • advising an adtech scale-up on managing and successfully resolving a business-critical dispute with a leading ad network.

adtekr

Our adtekr insights bring the adtech message to those who may not be technically-minded; to those who work in the marketing sector but are not marketers; and to those who are looking for a guiding light to help them through the jargon. 

You can also visit the adtekr page for more adtekr content.

07/12/2023
COP28: how the law can unite, act and deliver the UN SDGs
The law, and the work of lawyers, should enable countries, communities and companies to deliver the changes needed to achieve the UN SDGs and the Paris Agreement. As COP28 urges us to unite, act and deliver, Advocates for International Development (A
adtekr
Read Adtech adtekr insights now
Advising the Board

Feed

16/07/2021
The way the cookie crumbles: Google’s changing approach to third-party...
Last year, Google announced the introduction of its Privacy Sandbox, an initiative with a mission to “create a thriving web ecosystem that is respectful of users and private by default”. As part of this initiative, Google has pledged to remove support for third-party cookies from its ad networks and Chrome platform. From Google’s perspective, this is a positive step forward: third party cookies are used to track users across the Internet and their removal will make it more difficult for advertisers to do this. Indeed, Google itself states on its Ads and Commerce Blog that “[p]eople shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising. And advertisers don't need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising”. So, what does this mean for advertisers who still want to target users? Well, Google will replace its support for third-party cookies with an AI system called the Federated Learning of Cohorts (or “FLoC”) which (as explained by the Electronic Frontier Fed­er­a­tion):…uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other "similar" people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web. This makes it easier to identify you with browser fingerprinting, and it gives trackers a head start on profiling you. Thus, instead of identifying users individually, Chrome will place users into cohorts based on their browsing habits and allow advertisers to target their ads to these cohorts, rather than individuals. This means that ads will be delivered to users in a more anonymous way, without (according to Google) inhibiting the ability of advertisers to deliver those ads in a targeted way. So, everyone is happy, right?Well, no - not everyone is excited by this proposition. Indeed, critics have warned that the use of FLoC by Google still means that users will be tracked to some extent while they browse online. Further, there is concern that grouping users into cohorts could result in discrimination again certain groups if, for example, sensitive attributes (such as race, sexual orientation, disability, etc) are used as the basis for grouping. It is also worth remembering that Google has only committed to remove support for third-party cookies; its support for first-party cookies will continue. In addition to the privacy concerns, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) has launched an investigation in relation to the Privacy Sandbox to assess whether the changes could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of competitors.  With the CMA investigation and these other criticisms, Google has now announced that it is delaying the full implementation of the Privacy Sandbox until late 2023.  In the meantime, Google is still trialling FLoC in selected countries so we will have to wait and see how effective it is as a pri­vacy-pre­serving alternative for both users and advertisers alike.
06/04/2021
Universal, humanistic: adtech
During a speech at this year’s virtual Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) Conference in Brussels, Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) urged online attendees to “… send a universal, humanistic response...
06/07/2020
Advertising in a time of crisis
As the world moves to ease lockdown measures, we begin to emerge, blinking, into a world that will have been forever altered by the events of 2020. We all hope we are past the worst from a personal perspective...