It’s supply-side platform week for Unified ID 2.0.
On Tuesday, PubMatic signed onto the initiative, one day after Magnite and Index Exchange signaled their support for the open source project.
The goal of Unified ID 2.0 is to create a standard identifier for the ad industry using hashed emails as a replacement for third-party cookies.
Over the past three weeks, LiveRamp, Criteo and Nielsen also joined the effort, which is being largely shepherded by The Trade Desk.
The sell-side’s role is critical in scaling third-party cookie alternatives, said Andrew Baron, VP of marketplace at PubMatic, so the industry needs to make it easy for publishers to adopt new IDs and maximize coverage across their media.
And because “the world of IDs may become more complicated before consolidating,” Baron said, it’s up to sell-side tech vendors “to help publishers rationalize the various ID solutions to fit their business needs.”
Publishers will also require help from their tech partners to transact on new ID solutions, he said.
PubMatic has pledged to offer Unified ID 2.0 as a default identifier to the more than 180 publishers using Identity Hub, its ID management solution.
In practice, when a new publisher starts using Identity Hub, it will automatically get access to UID 2.0.
Once the integration is complete, Baron said, all of the publishers that are live on Identity Hub will be upgraded to Unified ID 2.0, and DSPs and buyers downstream will be able to start discovering inventory and targeting against the ID.
This should help publishers get more control over data packaging, yield, page latency and data security, Baron said, as well as help marketers do targeting, attribution and frequency capping.
PubMatic’s partnership with The Trade Desk for UID 2.0 is similar in scope to the partnership TTD struck with LiveRamp in late October. LiveRamp plans to include the ID in its infrastructure so that its publishers can access it and Trade Desk buyers can more easily bid on LiveRamp IdentityLink IDs.
The full Unified ID 2.0 roster now includes LiveRamp, Criteo, Nielsen, Magnite, Index Exchange and PubMatic.
So, what’s coming next? Trade Desk EVP Michelle Hulst recently told AdExchanger that The Trade Desk had plans to announce a flurry of new partners in the weeks to come, including supply-side partners (check), advertisers and publishers.
The latter two categories are still missing from the UID 2.0 lineup, but that’s likely to change soon if The Trade Desk continues its brisk pace of partnerships to buoy Unified ID 2.0.
In other PubMatic news, the company filed to raise $75 million for an IPO on the Nasdaq late last week, reporting $127 million in revenue for the past 12 months ending in the third quarter, a 33% YoY increase.
But the cookie question looms large, as does the need for industry collaboration as per the UID 2.0.
“Without cookies, mobile device IDs and other tracking technology data, transactions processed through our platform would be executed with less insight into consumer activity, reducing the precision of advertisers’ decisions about which impressions to purchase for an advertising campaign,” PubMatic noted in its S-1. “This could make placement of advertising through our platform less valuable and harm our revenue.”
