Identity, User IDs and Cookies

Identity, User IDs and Cookies

In the past few months there’s been a great deal of discussion recently about the Cookie in general and how it will cease to operate as we know it today. No one knows when, but we’ve seen recently a range of blocking of 3^rd party Cookies in various web browsers such as Safari and Mozilla.

This makes it terribly difficult for not only brand advertisers to build audiences, but the inability for ad servers to implement basic features like running audience segments, frequency capping and conversion pixels. GDPR has certainly been a contributing factor and we’ve started to see a number of solutions born in Europe such as ID5.

While the Cookie starts to die a slow death and there are hacky solutions such as writing First Party Cookies, our focus has been to offer a business as usual approach to Brand Advertisers through to DSPs and SSPs. So with this in mind, we are very much at the forefront of the move to cookieless Identity based solutions.

We’ve recently partnered with these Identify Partners offering Programmatic buyers to leverage hashed identity targeting across our Prebid enabled inventory today via Deals and Open Exchange buying, and will in the future be able to offer this across our entire inventory supply.

• ID5

• LiveRamp Identity

• Unified ID Solution (The Trade Desk)

• Digitrust

Our first partner SSP via Prebid to get running is Index Exchange. If you haven’t seen Mike O’Sullivans interview with ExchangeWire – definitely worth the time to watch how Identiy will play a major role into the future.

Whilst we’ve done the integration across our publishers it does require that all DSPs and SSPs take the same approach. Some will side with just one Identity Partner, whilst others will leverage multi solutions. The jury is out on who will be the leader in the Identity space will be, but I think there is more than enough room for a few players, and maybe even regional players.

We are taking the view that we will integrate all main stream identity solutions allowing advertisers to run and target their audiences across our supply.