What lies behind "799 partners"
When a banner lists hundreds of providers, the TCF is usually behind it – an advertising industry framework that passes consent along between thousands of participants. The reason for the number lies in an auction that takes a tenth of a second.
Advertising space today is no longer sold but auctioned – individually, for every page view. Between the click and the finished page an auction runs in which dozens to hundreds of bidders may take part. What is sold is not the space alone but the space together with what is known about the person in front of it.
What happens in that tenth of a second
- The page is openedThe ad slot reports that space is available.
- A profile is assembledApproximate location, device, page visited, existing identifiers, often interest categories.
- The request goes out to every bidderTo dozens or hundreds at once. All of them see the profile, whether or not they bid.
- The bid is awardedThe highest bid wins and delivers the ad. The rest keep what they have seen.
The TCF as a delivery system for consent
So that everyone involved knows whether they may act, the European advertising association IAB created the Transparency and Consent Framework. The banner produces a compact string – the TC string – stating for every registered vendor and every purpose whether consent exists. That string then travels through the whole chain.
Hence the long lists: the framework requires every vendor for whom consent is sought to be named. The number in the banner is therefore no exaggeration but an honest statement – and it describes precisely the problem.
Who this is relevant for
The TCF concerns only websites that serve programmatic advertising. A company site, a shop or a blog without ad space does not need it – and should not deploy it. A banner with 800 vendors on a site without advertising is a sign that a default template was adopted without adapting it to the service in question.
The consequence is not harmless: consent is collected for processing that never takes place, and the list makes the decision practically impossible for any reader – so the very consent being sought fails on the informed requirement.
A list nobody can read does not satisfy the duty to inform – it satisfies only its form.