Whose Digital Identity Consortium will Win?
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.
- 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.