Unified ID 2.0

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem… This comic first ran on January 7, 2022.

CTV measurement is a total mess: Agree or disagree? “It’s a mess,” says Lynette Kaylor, SVP of North America ad sales at sports-focused streaming platform FuboTV. And don’t even get her started on using audience panels to measure streaming audiences.

Optable is latest company to partner with The Trade Desk via UID2. The integration is in closed beta and set to go live for all Optable customers in Q4. Like InfoSum, Amazon Web Services, Snowflake and Acxiom and Kinesso (both owned by IPG), Optable will be what’s known as a closed or private UID2 operator.

Salesforce quietly introduced a new app in its App Exchange on Wednesday that was developed by The Trade Desk as a way to convert CDP identity data to Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs. “The evolution of ad tech and martech is toward more and more first-party data being stored in cloud databases and in CDPs,” said Ben Sylvan, The Trade Desk’s GM of data partnerships.

P&G publicly signaled its support for Unified ID 2.0 on Thursday. But the CGP giant had already been using UID 2.0 since last year to create anonymized identifiers tied to its first-party data for activation in the bidstream.

Add MediaMath to the list of Unified ID 2.0 partners. On Tuesday, MediaMath announced its integration with UID2, which is an open-source industry initiative, spearheaded by The Trade Desk, that aims to replace third-party cookies with hashed and encrypted email-based IDs.

Having a profile on a dating app doesn’t mean that you’re dating. It just means you’re out there. The same could be said for many (of the many) cookieless identifiers on the scene. They’ve been deployed by publishers – the code is on the page – but they aren’t getting picked up in the bidstream.

If addressable ad IDs are the new keys to the kingdom, then you’ll find The Trade Desk at Epcot this summer. Which is to say, Disney and The Trade Desk announced an identity integration on Tuesday that will allow advertisers to activate against Disney’s first-party data programmatically via its clean room data product using Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs.

What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.

The Trade Desk keeps adding new partners to the Unified ID 2.0 roster, but it’s still looking for someone to fill the administrator role after the IAB Tech Lab backed out earlier this year.