The Advertising ID Consortium Welcomes New Platform Partners

The Advertising ID Consortium – the open identity solution for the digital advertising ecosystem – has announced new platform partners.

Since the Consortium’s announcement in May 2017, the founding members have established a governance framework and product specification that includes an open and standardised cookie and accessible people-based identifiers, delivered in a secure, privacy conscious omnichannel identity framework.

Additionally, The Trade Desk has agreed to support the Consortium’s identity framework by making its ID solution compatible with the Consortium’s Open Ad ID, a major step toward consolidating an open and ubiquitous solution.

The addition of major advertising technology platforms gives the Consortium critical mass as it expands to include publishers, marketers, and agencies. The following platform companies from both the supply and demand sides have signed term sheets to join the Consortium:

• Adform
• AerServ
• Amobee
• DataXu
• DistrictM
• IgnitionOne
• Kargo
• LiveIntent
• Numberly
• OpenX
• PulsePoint
• Ad
• Sizmek
• Thunder
• TradeLab
• Unruly
• Videology

Additionally, The Trade Desk will join the Consortium’s board of directors.

This growing list of industry participants that represent publishers and advertisers from across the open internet affirms the benefits of widespread identity collaboration.

Through the Consortium, these independent companies are supporting a framework that combines cookies with identity solutions to enable advertisers to target users with tailored messages, help publishers better monetise their inventory, and improve advertising relevance for consumers.

The Consortium’s two-part identity framework is comprised of a device and a people-based identifier that together will deliver a more seamless and relevant user experience.

At launch, the solution includes an Open Ad ID (the standard for single­ device cookie identification) and an Open IdentityLink (a common people-based identifier for resolving identity across channels, devices and platforms).

The identity framework will be provided to Consortium members at no cost.

Supported by its founding members, the Consortium has modified and developed important technologies to provide immediate scale, including the use of adnxs.com as the domain name and cookie space, and the IdentityLink people-based identifier.

Adnxs.com is one of the largest cookie pools, and LiveRamp’s IdentityLink is the largest deterministic identity graph available for the open web.

Access to these established assets gives the Consortium the scale to deliver value to its members and the ecosystem immediately.

The Consortium is structured such that it has perpetual access to the technologies contributed by the members, and the Consortium governing board will add additional capabilities as other providers join.

The Consortium is open to all identity graph and cross-device suppliers to join, including deterministic and probabilistic methodologies.

Identity solution providers can build a Consortium ‘sidecar’ for encryption of data or an equivalent technology so that supply-side platforms (SSPs) in the Consortium can adopt it.

Drew Bradstock, senior vice president of product at Index Exchange, said the Consortium is yet another example of independent companies joining forces to combat issues the programmatic industry has faced for years.

“The Consortium, along with initiatives like header bidding and Ads.txt, will serve as long-term solutions for all facets of the industry,” he said.

Jakob Bak, co-founder and chief technology officer at Adform, said: “Companies across the programmatic ecosystem today rely on their own identifiers like platform-specific cookies.

“Compared with a unified approach, this leads to fragmented identities, audience loss, less reach, and as a result, less effective advertising.

“The Advertising ID Consortium solves these challenges by standardising around one ID, and enables people-based advertising at a scale far beyond the walled gardens.

“This is accomplished while also creating transparency to the level required for new privacy regulations like the EU’s GDPR.”

Tradelab chief technology officer Vincent Mady said: “This consortium is a significant milestone in the natural development of programmatic, given its need for transparency and the maturity of its players and buying techniques.

“ID unification is unavoidable in a market fragmented by mobile and consumers’ multi-screen habits, as well as the need to build a trustworthy relationship with a person over a long period of time.

“The dream of connecting branding with performance (including drive-to-store) will become a reality. The market of digital advertising is (finally) leaving the Stone Age.”

LiveIntent CEO Matt Keiser said: “LiveIntent is a partner to over 1,500 publishers seeking to improve monetisation in a changing landscape, and their mobile ad-supported content, delivered in apps (with the most popular being email) requires cross-environment attribution, which is a challenge similar to cross-device measurement.

“Individual publishers without the scale or tech-savvy of the large tech companies can’t solve for a fundamental truth: cookies can’t go cross-channel or cross-device.

“Through the consortium’s identity framework, publishers will be able to better prove attribution across environments and devices, leading to elevated monetisation.”