Whose Digital Identity Consortium will Win?

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Companies in programmatic rely on their own cookies or device advertising IDs to anonymously identify audiences. Thus a consumer can receive many identifiers, resulting in data loss through fragmentation. This is how we got to the problem of a flood of data, yet decreased understanding of consumers, less effective targeting, frequency management, optimization, attribution, and a poor consumer experience.
As the digital advertising industry has matured and the criticisms have increased the ad tech portion of the ecosystem has been looking for a single identity solution. However, with the coming of GDPR and all the movement toward transparency and brand safety, this year ups the ante.
Digitrust was the first effort of the industry at a unified identity for consumers. In November, Rubicon wrote:

Cookies have ruled the ad industry since the early days of online browsing and shopping — helping media companies understand who their audiences were and what they were interested in, while making sure advertisers could deliver the most relevant messages. But the growth of programmatic and the mobile explosion have changed the industry dramatically, leading to a growing sense that cookies are no longer enough.

Across the industry, technology companies, advertisers, and publishers are all seeking an alternative to cookies — and there are a variety of solutions vying to be the go-to way we identify users and analyze their behavior moving forward. DigiTrust, the non-profit, independent ID consortium supported by companies like Rubicon Project, Dataxu and OpenX is one such option…

At the time, Rubicon decided to back Digitrust, but in the interim two other options have emerged.

The Trade Desk Cookie Sync

The Trade Desk has opened their cookie sync database to other organizations. The database is stored in their proprietary domain, and is in line with our existing implementation. However, this solution is only helpful to ZEDO if it is adopted by other players, and as yet there is no information on that.

Advertising Id Consortium
The third of these options is the Advertising ID Consortium, which takes a collaborative approach to solving these issues by providing: 
  • An open and standardized pool for cookie and device IDs.
  • The availability of people-based identifiers.
  • An omnichannel identity framework that adheres to privacy, security, and compliance requirements, industry standards, and best practices.

This is a solution similar to The Trade Desk’s, although headed by Liveramp and Appnexus. The problem with it is that everyone is trying to build Cross Domain Targeting Technology, and if this consortium takes off, Liveramp seizes the competitive advantage.

Competition among the major players may prevent any single solution from gaining enough traction to “win.” That would be painful for those of us who would then have to implement three different solutions.