Score another win for AD-ID.
On Wednesday, AD-ID announced a partnership with Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS), a division of Comcast Cable that develops buying and planning products for advertisers.
With this “new strategic alliance,” as the press release calls the partnership, the two companies seek to drive further adoption of the ID system and promote better standards for the digital advertising industry.
This announcement also comes not long after the IAB Tech Lab finalized specifications for its own Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF), which it announced last year. AD-ID helped to develop the ACIF’s specifications and also serves as the primary ad registrar for North America.
Even in just the last few months, AD-ID CEO Nada Bradbury told AdExchanger that she feels the “tide is turning” with regard to unique identifier adoption.
“The more folks come on board, the more second nature it’ll become,” she said.
Checking IDs
Originally founded 20 years ago as a joint venture between the 4A’s and the Association of National Advertisers, AD-ID is a unique identifier embedded with metadata that’s specific to the ad creative – almost like a UPC code for ads, as Bradbury is fond of saying.
This metadata includes information like ad type, length and brand, and can be used to track ad placement, frequency caps and payments.
Currently, AD-ID is used by 80% of Fortune 500 advertisers and their agencies, she said, as well as many publishers and even SAG-AFTRA, which requires that all ads made under a union contract incorporate the technology for tracking purposes.
But even though AD-ID has fairly strong adoption on the advertiser side, it can be more difficult to get individuals at those brands or ad vendors to use it in practice, Bradbury told AdExchanger. For example, someone tasked with inputting creative into an ad server might forget to input the AD-ID code if the product isn’t top of mind for them.
“Everybody wants more efficiency,” she said. “And there’s money to be made by making sure that ads are being placed appropriately.”
Getting the team together
Getting a big company like Comcast to switch up its workflow can be a slow-moving process, as Bradbury told AdExchanger this past February.
Luckily, Comcast had been a client of AD-ID for years already and understood the potential benefits that a universal identifier could bring to clients, she shared in advance of Wednesday’s announcement.
In 2021, NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, became the first major media company to incorporate AD-ID’s identifier into its own tech stack for advertisers, called One Platform.
Talks to better incorporate AD-IDs into CTS products started about a year ago, according to Bradbury, and has so far involved a lot of little tweaks – the most obvious one being that now the AD-ID is a required input field within AdFusion, CTS’s primary ad management platform, so it can’t be as easily overlooked.
But, more importantly, the partnership has involved training both employees and clients of both companies, AD-ID and CTS, with educational webinars, speaking engagements and awareness campaigns (like this announcement, for starters).
Capping things off
One big improvement for CTS in working with a creative ID is to better manage frequency capping, which is a particular headache in the CTV advertising space.
As proof, Bradbury cited a study AD-ID conducted with The Harris Poll last year on the effects of ad fatigue. Of those polled, one in four (26%) said that seeing the same ad over and over again on TV negatively impacted their purchasing decisions.
Better-categorized ads will be much easier to track across the entire media ecosystem, leading not only to more accurate cross-channel measurement, but more effective ways to cap frequency rates and even maintain brand safety guidelines.
Moving forward, Bradbury says she wants to see more adoption from “purely digital” players outside of CTV, including audio, social, display and even print ads.
Working with big providers in the space that “see everyone come through,” like CTS, can only help in that regard. “If they start providing education, we’re going to get greater adoption,” she said.
