In this latest edition of From The Bureau, Jonas Jaanimagi, IAB Australia tech lead, discusses IAB Australia’s release of an updated ‘Identifiers Explainer Guide and Matrix of Local ID Solutions’ in response to industry challenges with signal loss and evolving privacy regulations.
In late December 2021, IAB Australia published our original ‘Identifiers Explainer Guide and Matrix of Local ID Solutions’. It felt required at the time – and it was – but over the couple of years that followed, we received regular requests for both the information and the matrix of active providers to be updated.
The ongoing pressure that the industry has been feeling recently with relentless signal loss from the deprecation and/or throttling of traditional identifiers and the impending changes to privacy legislations has thrown a one-two combination of gut punches and driven an increasing demand for product development and standardisation around identity solutions.
It’s critical that alternative mechanisms can responsibly identify consumer interactions across the open internet and be managed, matched, activated and executed in a privacy preserving manner. So, I’m personally delighted that we have now managed to publish an updated ID Matrix and keep the Explainer current.
What’s new?
The new Matrix and refreshed guidance include specific updates from IAB Tech Lab including highlights from a dedicated set ID solutions technical guidance, the brand new PAIR protocol (which is a recent consolidation of the OPJA protocols and Google’s donated PAIR specs, for the secure and private matching of first-party audiences) and key OpenRTB updates to enable improved transparency on identifier sourcing and application within the bidstream.
All these key updates are relevant for all seller, vendors and buyers (whether brand marketers or media agencies) actively seeking to responsibly leverage identifiers such hashed emails, device IDs, or probabilistic identifiers. Also included is guidance in choosing vendors with suggested questions and key product capabilities to review as well as meaningful guidance on consumer privacy and recommendations on meeting any related legal obligations.
As the industry continues to shift towards privacy-safe solutions, IAB Tech Lab remains the key global source for addressability standards that help advertisers and publishers adapt and thrive. IAB Australia will continue to work hard to keep local industry, and our members fully updated on these types of critical technical updates.
Mitigating Signal Loss
With ongoing signal loss as a core ongoing issue and with the eventual deprecation of third-party cookie, it would be remiss of me not to include a reminder that there are essentially three main approaches that will remain fully future proofed.
Each organisation, advertiser, marketer, agency and publisher will need to ascertain how much effort, investment and resources should be dedicated to each depending upon their commercial & product strategies, access to first party data and technical competency. These are:
- ID-Enabled Responsible Addressability: as per the guidance in our now refreshed ‘Identifiers Explainer Guide & Matrix of local ID Solutions’, this is the activation, targeting and measurement managed via robust and persistent ID solutions to enable identifying consensual users across multiple devices and platforms. This allows advertisers to responsibly track user behaviour and preferences over time and deliver relevant targeted advertising whilst meeting consumer privacy and the legislative requirements.
- Contextual & Seller Defined Audiences: leveraging contextual targeting to target, based upon the content consumers have been consuming. This approach will always remain 100% sustainable and privacy compliant, as it only leverages the context of the content being consumed. Additionally, IAB’s Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) will be an important method for sellers to safely enable audience buying for buyers though advertising based on groups of users, being curated and surfaced to programmatic buyers without revealing individual user identities and without any data being linked in any manner.
- On-Device Facilitated Personas: a wide range of ever-evolving APIs from the major tech players striving to enable the mechanics of digital marketing in a privacy-preserving manner. This is done by leveraging the capabilities of browsers and mobile devices as secure environments for consumers, whilst also acting as facilitators of cohort-based marketing solutions. Many of these proposals are in beta or endlessly evolving and each are slightly ad-hoc. Rather than having DSPs creating targeting attributes through the collection of data via identifiers (such as 3rd party cookies) – user data will instead remain on-device and be anonymised, aggregated and synced to ad tech vendors via APIs. Examples are Microsoft’s Ad Selection API for Edge, Apple’s SKAdNetwork & Private Click Measurement for iOS and Google’s various Privacy Sandbox APIs such as Topics, Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting.
Unlike Keanu Reeves’s Matrix, there are no shortcuts or alternate realities. We highly recommend all industry members invest the time, effort and resources into testing each diligently with competent teams and/or partners. Please take advantage of the many handbooks, explainers and other guidance IAB has already published on these topics and get along to our in-person industry events for further updates, collaborative industry networking and best practice guidance.