Alternate IDs have trod a rocky road for years, from initial concerns over email-based identifiers to the fact that third-party cookies never forced adoption as the market initially anticipated.
So are alternate IDs just waiting for the right moment to become the preferred matchmaker between buyers and sellers – or are they more of a shot in the dark, like a Craigslist missed connection?
On this week’s podcast, we talk through a natural experiment that revealed the true impact of UID2. When a CTV publisher flubbed its encryption key, making its UIDs undecodable, it discovered two things: First, it was disappointed that The Trade Desk, which administrates the alt ID, didn’t notice that none of the publisher’s IDs was readable.
Second, once the publisher fixed the implementation a few months later, it discovered that the change made zero impact to their revenue. After being prodded to adopt UID2 for years by The Trade Desk, it felt doubly let down by the DSP, since the demand wasn’t there.
But this accidental A/B test ended up being a useful data point to examine for what the future of alt IDs might look like – which we unpack in the episode.
Location data settlement
Then, Kochava battled with the FTC for almost four years over allegations that it shared sensitive location data that could tie users to specific health care facilities and places of worship. Now Kochava has settled the case with the government consumer watchdog organization and will no longer share sensitive location data without consent.
Our data privacy expert and managing editor, Allison Schiff, tells us what this settlement says about the regulatory moment we are in right now, as well as what the case means for any ad tech company that handles location data.
