Eyeota recently announced its global integration with ID5’s Universal ID to increase the clarity of its audience identity resolution. Expanding the relationship with ID5 will see Eyeota’s Audience Identity Resolution connecting to multiple IDs associated with a user, enabling marketers to access people-based audiences without third-party cookies. This global integration with ID5 is part of Eyeota’s larger data diversity initiative to ensure its audience solutions remain flexible and addressable for brands and advertisers activating across omnichannel environments.
Kristina Prokop, Eyeota CEO and founder, and Mathieu Roche, CEO and co-founder of ID5, recently came together on an Eyeota Audience Data Session webinar and discussed the state of identity resolution in a changing adtech landscape. Here is a summary of the main points covered. You can watch the whole video here.
“Identity underpins a lot of the things that make digital advertising valuable for brands,” says Matthieu Roche. “We launched ID5 to address the increasingly challenging topic of identity resolution.”
Compared to walled garden publishers (read GAFA), open web, premium publishers and independent tech vendors face disadvantages when it comes to ID capabilities. The internet advertising industry has been based on third-party cookies since it started. Cookies were never perfect, however, especially at understanding user behaviors over time.
“In a future when third-party identity becomes less available, we’re launching a Universal ID to provide an alternative,” Roche says.
“With cookies,” says Kristina Prokop, “you have to go through the matching process, which is a challenge because everyone uses different languages and cookie spaces. So, you need to translate these spaces in order to make them compatible with each other.”
“That process doesn’t scale well, and this was the first problem we tried to solve,” continues Prokop. “The more cookie data we can scale, the more cookies Eyeota can match to a buyer’s platform, the more audience is available for the brand, and the more money generated for the data provider of those audiences.”
"There are a lot of efficiencies to be gained by addressing the scale issue in cookies; however, the long-term goal for ID5 has always been to redefine the way consumers are identified in a privacy compliant way," Roche says. “We recognize GDPR is having an effect on the rest of the world as a gold standard.”
Scale is one of the efficiencies which enables the walled gardens to be successful in driving so much money from brands. So, making the infrastructure work for the open web means giving all data platforms equal access to the opportunity for scale.
“For us, it’s a juggling game to prioritize platforms,” says Prokop. “It’s not always a good idea to prioritize the platforms that make you the most amount of money. At what point do ID5 develop the next evolution of the Connect service?”
According to Roche, ID5 connects hundreds of platforms to an ID5 identity. This ID sits at the center of a hub and spoke which exists to connect different data platforms together.
“When cookies disappear, we will use the ID5 ID at the hub and leverage our partnerships and penetration on the publisher side to have relationships on a first party basis rather than third party basis,” he adds.
"By doing this, ID5 enables a progressive transition, which equals more control over privacy and publisher data leakage by creating a better system. Being able to directly manage environments where there are cookies and environments where cookies are absent increases efficiencies," says Roche.
"That’s interesting for Eyeota," Prokop says. “This is exactly where we find ourselves because cookies aren’t dead yet and we’ve built our platform to ensure flexibility and nobody really knows how this plays out.”
Eyeota’s objective is to collect as much data and transport it through the ecosystem as seamlessly as possible. "The end game," says Prokop, "isn’t going to be one type of ID that powers the ecosystem, it will be multiple ID solutions. Being capable of processing multiple IDs is the only option moving forward."
“The world is getting more complicated with more players and solutions,” says Roche. “But it is also getting more efficient. We need to balance that complexity versus efficiency, so we’re not fighting each other as an industry. We’re fighting Google and Facebook!”
"Building solutions for a shared infrastructure is complex," says Roche, "but it will drive efficiencies for everyone."
"It’s about embracing scalable ID methods so we can all work much better together and provide brands with a true alternative.”
To be continued...
To watch the whole Eyeota Audience Data Session, click here.
