AdChoices and CMPs: A Comparison for Brands and Publishers
The AdChoices program often gets questions from companies unsure whether they need to use our self-regulatory program if they’re already using a consent management platform (CMP).
The simplest way to think about it
A CMP manages consent and preferences on your site or app (domain-level choices).
AdChoices provides an industry-wide interest-based advertising (IBA) choice experience (cross-site/cross-app choices across participating companies).
What CMPs generally do
CMPs typically:
present a banner/module experience,
let visitors permit or revoke data collection/use for multiple purposes (ads, analytics, etc.) on that site/app, and,
share consent status with ad tech vendors, which can then be shared onward in the bidstream.
What AdChoices generally does
AdChoices focuses on:
enhanced notice for IBA (via an ad marker/icon experience),
consumer control tools that let people opt out of IBA from participating companies, and,
accountability oversight for companies that join.
In summary
A CMP is not a substitute for AdChoices. CMPs can help support a participating company’s approach, but they do not replace AdChoices’ IBA-focused, industry-wide notice and choice layer.
A practical “best of both” worlds approach
If you use a CMP, you can use AdChoices placements (for example, in a footer or app menu) as an always-on way to:
reprompt the CMP when needed, and
offer cross-site/cross-app IBA choices that aren’t native to CMPs.
It’s really not a “versus” situation; it’s an “and”. Using a CMP plus AdChoices together allows companies to enhance their overall privacy best practices, especially for the tricky requirements for interest-based advertising in Canada.
Interested in using AdChoices? Reach out to us!