Publishers that want access to programmatic CTV demand are under immense pressure to include alternative IDs like The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 in their bid requests.
The idea is that these alt IDs enable omnichannel ad targeting, leading buyers to prioritize bid requests that include them.
But who’s checking to see whether the data that publishers pass in alt ID fields is accurate and obtained with consent? And is anyone preventing shady publishers from passing junk IDs to drum up demand for their inventory?
When it comes to UID2, the buck stops with The Trade Desk, which serves as the sole administrator for the UID2 protocol. But, as it turns out, TTD’s oversight of the data underlying UID2s is less stringent in practice than some industry experts thought.
A source at a major national CTV publisher, who requested anonymity to speak freely, recently contacted AdExchanger with concerns that errors in their own UID2 setup were never caught by TTD.
This source felt very strongly that TTD should have caught these errors in the course of its DSP ingesting the publisher’s bid requests. They added that TTD’s failure to do so gave the publisher serious doubts about TTD’s oversight of the data underlying UID2s.
“They clearly were unable to flag that we made an unintentional mistake,” the source said. “I’m not confident they would have been able to detect a malicious implementation, either.”
TTD confirmed that this publisher’s errors would have made its UID2s useless for ad targeting. But TTD also told AdExchanger that it wouldn’t have had enough information to flag anything wrong with this publisher’s UID2 setup.
What went wrong? Let’s dig in.
Encryption error
First, here’s a recap of what happened with the CTV publisher’s UID2 integration.
This publisher had recently started passing UID2s in its bid requests after years of pressure from The Trade Desk to adopt its alt ID.
The source told AdExchanger they’d always had misgivings about the viability of an email-based ID like UID2 for CTV ad targeting. TV and CTV platforms primarily use one-to-many targeting methods like household IDs and IP addresses as opposed to one-to-one targeting by email address. But the publisher put its misgivings aside and decided to adopt UID2 rather than risk missing out on buyers who prioritize bid requests containing alt IDs.
The publisher also opted to become one of hundreds of “private operators” responsible for hashing and encrypting its audience data (i.e., email addresses) to create UID2 tokens, rather than delegating encryption to a “public operator” like TTD or another third party.
But adoption didn’t go as planned.
The CTV publisher source voluntarily admitted to AdExchanger that their company made inadvertent encryption errors when creating UID2 tokens.
The publisher’s encryption errors would have made its UID2 tokens irreconcilable for ad targeting, confirmed Waseem Basheer, SVP of engineering at The Trade Desk.
“If one party is messing up the signal by mistake,” he told AdExchanger, “then matching will be very difficult to achieve, a lot of information will be lost in those signals and you will not get the right valuation of the [bid requests].”
Fixing the error changed nothing
The publisher eventually noticed the flaws in its encryption after three months and fixed the error on its own. From there, it began sending properly encrypted UID2s.
However, the publisher source said, during the three months when it was passing invalid UID2s, The Trade Desk never flagged the error. Instead, the source claimed, they only heard positive feedback from their TTD account reps for starting to pass the signals. And their account reps also did not seem to notice any difference after the publisher fixed the encryption error, the source claimed.
But something more concerning stood out once the error was rectified. According to the publisher, they saw no noticeable impact to their ad revenue – either positive or negative.
In other words, as far as this publisher was concerned, adopting UID2 didn’t improve demand for their CTV ad inventory. Their best guess is that advertisers simply weren’t decisioning on its UID2s and defaulted to the legacy signals the publisher had previously passed in bid requests.
Not that it’s possible for publishers to discern the impact of UID2 adoption on their demand, anyway.
TTD does not provide reporting on which data signals buyers are transacting against, and indeed claims to be unable to do so because of the sheer number of different signals contained within each individual bid request.
No revenue impact, no problem?
Ironically, it was the lack of any noticeable revenue impact that prevented The Trade Desk from flagging errors in the publisher’s UID2 setup, according to TTD’s Basheer.
During the initial process of approving a publisher as a private operator, TTD does extensive vetting to ensure a publisher has all the proper contracts and protocols in place to create UID2 tokens, said Samantha Jacobson, chief strategy officer and EVP at The Trade Desk. TTD also provides tools for private operators to test their UID2 setups to ensure they’re working properly, she added.
Beyond that initial vetting, TTD would have to notice some kind of fluctuation in demand in order to flag that something had gone amiss with a private operator’s setup.
“If there is no anomaly, it’s very difficult to identify the problem,” Basheer said.
However, the source who brought the issue to AdExchanger’s attention believes TTD should have noticed that the publisher was sending bad UID2s, both in the normal course of its day-to-day operations as a DSP and in its role as UID2 administrator.
How TTD sees its oversight role
AdExchanger reached out to a former TTD employee with knowledge of UID2 to get their opinion. This source also requested anonymity to speak freely.
The former employee said that, as a DSP, TTD should have recognized that the UID2s in the publisher’s bid requests did not drive an expected increase in demand. If the publisher’s account reps were actually digging into the data behind the publisher’s ad transactions rather than just “checking a box” on UID2 adoption, they added, the reps would have noticed something was off.
Furthermore, the former TTD employee explained that, as UID2 administrator, TTD holds the metaphorical key for reconciling encrypted UID2s between the buy side and sell side without exposing the underlying personally identifiable data. And, according to this source, if TTD was actually applying this decryption on every applicable bid request, as might reasonably be expected of the UID2 administrator, it would have recognized that the improperly encrypted UID2s were not reconcilable to anything.
TTD pushed back on this assessment.
Jacobson said TTD considers its roles as a DSP and administrator of UID2 to be separate responsibilities. Neither advertisers nor publishers should expect TTD to catch errors in UID2 setups during its regular work as a DSP, she said, because that business is separate from TTD’s oversight role for UID2.
But even when TTD is acting as UID2 admin, Jacobson added, it’s unrealistic to expect it to decrypt UID2s in every bid request it sees to check that they are properly set up.
“There’s nothing that requires any third party to sit in the middle and look at every single impression,” she said, “because that just wouldn’t make sense given the volume of impressions that are considered.”
The aforementioned CTV publisher did not find these explanations satisfactory, to say the least.
“Even if ‘administrator’ and ‘DSP’ are separate roles, they are both roles owned by TTD’s business,” they said.
Who administrates the administrator?
The Trade Desk’s dual role as a buying platform that makes bidding decisions based on alt IDs and as the only administrator of its own alt ID has been criticized since UID2’s initial rollout in 2020. Some see TTD’s admin role as a conflict of interest.
The Trade Desk apparently agreed with that assessment at one point, since it tried – in vain – to find a third-party administrator for the UID2 protocol.
The IAB Tech Lab was once considered for the role of UID2 admin, but declined to take it on. Today, the Tech Lab only serves to ensure that the UID2 protocol remains open source, said Shailley Singh, COO and EVP of product at IAB Tech Lab. It has no oversight role beyond that.
Prebid.org was also at one point in the mix to become a UID2 operator, which is separate from the admin role.
According to Garett McGrath, chair of Prebid.org, Prebid only considered becoming a UID2 operator on the condition that TTD would not serve as administrator. When no third party agreed to take the job, leaving TTD as the de facto admin, Prebid decided not to become an operator.
“Grading your own homework, being in control of that, seems a little funky,” McGrath responded when asked to describe Prebid’s misgivings.
For its part, TTD believes creating the private operator role has helped solve many of the perceived conflicts of interest regarding its UID2 oversight, Jacobson said.
She added, though, that TTD would likely still be open to considering a third-party administrator if the right candidate presented itself.
Who benefits and who is harmed?
However, several of the sources who spoke with AdExchanger for this story believe that TTD still has self-interested reasons to push for widespread UID2 adoption – or to obscure evidence that the protocol may not be effective in driving scaled demand.
One buy-side source speculated that if bid requests containing UID2s attract higher CPMs from buyers, then TTD’s DSP might be collecting more revenue when buyers buy UID2-enriched impressions through the platform.
Jacobson denied that this would be the case. She explained that, typically, buyers come to TTD’s DSP with a fixed campaign budget, rather than a target number of impressions. So, even if CPMs for UID2-enriched impressions are higher, this would only affect the number of impressions a buyer bids on, not the total amount of money they spend through TTD’s DSP.
The same buy-side source also speculated that the inclusion of UID2s in bid requests might give TTD’s DSP deeper insight into bidding behavior across the programmatic ecosystem that it could use to its advantage in ad auctions.
Basheer agreed that UID2 is “a powerful signal for us to base our decisioning on,” particularly for connecting users across devices. Jacobson noted, however, that TTD gets similar insights from other alternative IDs that the company doesn’t have oversight of.
But the former Trade Desk employee who spoke to AdExchanger had the most pointed assessment of what TTD gains by encouraging publishers to adopt UID2.
“The company is not evaluating the actual impact of UID2 in the bidstream,” they said. Rather, UID2 adoption is “a box they need to check so that [TTD CEO] Jeff Green doesn’t look bad” for investing the company’s resources in the protocol, and so that TTD can promote the storyline that UID2 adoption continues to grow.
TTD, unsurprisingly, disagrees with that take.
“We’ve had endorsement from all of the major broadcasters,” Jacobson said. “The hundreds of participants that not only are using it but have been public about their endorsement of it speaks to that.”
Still, the former TTD employee said that, as a shareholder in the company, they’d like to see more assurance as to what value TTD has gotten out of its investment in UID2, considering the CTV publisher’s issue with its UID2 integration.
To be fair, one doesn’t have to look too far to find positive case studies on both the buy side and sell side regarding UID2’s effectiveness. But what about the fact that the CTV publisher’s experience suggests the lack of any apparent revenue lift from adopting the ID?
Everyone AdExchanger spoke with about this issue – including the CTV publisher, The Trade Desk and multiple other sources – agrees it doesn’t appear that either the publisher or buyers were harmed by the publisher’s flawed UID2 integration and TTD’s failure to recognize it. After all, demand continued to flow as usual.
But several sources pointed to the likelihood that some publishers in the CTV space – particularly FAST channel publishers that typically don’t have direct first-party access to email logins – could be generating UID2s using sketchy data or emails from third-party data brokers. These concerns don’t only apply to UID2, they said, but also the wider alt ID ecosystem in the CTV market.
Though AdExchanger’s CTV publisher source saved their harshest criticism for UID2.
“UID2s are giving a false sense of confidence in identity in an environment where there’s a lot of garbage data going in and out, with a significant amount of opacity in the middle that The Trade Desk has purposely built to eliminate accountability,” they said.
“There might be legitimate data there as well,” they added, “but nobody ever knows, because you can’t audit and you can’t track it.”
Prebid’s McGrath, however, felt that perspective is too alarmist. He said he didn’t see anything necessarily wrong with the idea that TTD isn’t decrypting every UID2 it sees, and a period of three months probably wouldn’t provide enough data to make an assessment anyway.
Still, everyone except The Trade Desk, including McGrath, seems to agree that more could be done by TTD to shore up its oversight of UID2 and the data underlying these IDs.
Meanwhile, the CTV publisher denied they had their own motivations for poking holes in UID2, such as pushing for adoption of a different alt ID or audience graph instead.
“I’m a legitimate publisher, so I hope they would build a better UID2, and then find some scammers and get rid of them,” they said. “[That way], there’ll be more money in the marketplace for my inventory to be sold.”
But, they added, TTD doesn’t seem interested in the feedback. “At a senior level, they’re like, ‘We have our strategy, and you have to get on board.’”
