Dovekey: should contextual ad request be required to return an ad? about ads-privacy HOT 1 OPEN

For an SSP that believes interest group-based ads are more likely to win auctions, should it have the option to opt out of returning an ad at all and instead only return a contextual signal? The ad returned by the KV server would be the only one downloaded.

My intent in the original TURTLEDOVE proposal was certainly that some buyers could return just contextual signals, and their ads would participate exclusively through the on-device-auction mechanism. I don't see any reason why Dovekey would change this.

One could imagine the SSP specifying a null interest group ID for ads that want to server based purely on the contextual signal. The initial contextual ad request could potentially also specify a fallback URL for the creative in the event that the KV server ends up not having a matching key.

Are you describing a way for a contextually targeted ad to be served by the KV server? I never considered this possibility, since in TURTLEDOVE-original this would basically require pre-fetching all the ads in the world. In Dovekey-world I guess this seems plausible, but I'm not sure what advantage it offers over a contextual-only ad just being served in the normal way.

from ads-privacy.