Protected Audience API is the rebranded version of Google’s Privacy Sandbox Initiative, formerly known as FLEDGE API.
What is the Protected Audience API?
Initially emerged as the so-called “Locally-Executed Decision over Groups” (or shortly, FLEDGE) experiment, at its current stage, the Protected Audience API initiative is aimed at enabling the successful remarketing/serving of ads to brands’ custom audiences, without third-party tracking of user activity across browsers/apps.
In other words, the API enables brand advertisers, ad agencies and/or ad tech vendors to serve end users with customized advertising content, based on their previous engagement with the website/app, while limiting the sharing of user IDs across digital properties, as well as the disclosure/sharing of the website/app interaction data with third parties.
Why FLEDGE API Became Protected Audience API
According to Google, the rebranding of FLEDGE to Protected Audience was mostly due to their necessity to provide a clearer, more comprehensive understanding of what the API is required for (supposedly, without adding the definition of abbreviation each time the tech solution is being mentioned), now that the company is pushing forward its adoption on a greater scale.
As for the back-end implementation, however, it looks like the name FLEDGE will remain in the code in one way or another, as Google promises to keep the underlying APIs, as well as the commands as they are, hoping to lower the disruptions.
Benefits of using Protected Audience API
One of the most obvious benefits of Protected Audience APIs for advertising businesses lies in their continuous ability to create and retarget custom audiences without third-party tracking in place.
From the publishers’ perspective, the technology should enable them to keep their audience data secure, while still being able to monetize their editorial inventory with relevant digital ads.
Perspectives of Adoption
Similar to other initiatives within Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the Protected Audience API, obviously, isn’t a remedy of its own, when it comes to the deprecation of third-party cookies.
More importantly, given the limitation of the testing capabilities outside the ecosystem of Google’s digital ad products, it’s hard to predict how well this tech solution will perform in case of its market-wide adoption, even if this adoption takes place sometime in the next several years.