The loss of digital identity is a vexing question for digital marketers with 2024 looming ever so close. Next year brings not just the official start of the presidential cycle, but also the sunset of the third-party cookie.
Some practitioners are rallying around The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 (UID) as a replacement, which was pioneered by TTD although built for the whole industry, but there are other identifiers that are rising to fill the void, too — including ones from Yahoo and LiveRamp.
The big challenge, according to Carly Dome, a digital ad veteran currently with data company Alliant, will be how political marketers connect these identifiers across channels.
“Is it address, is it past email [or] IP address?” asked Dome. “I think it’s important to be able to connect on the identifier and how you can connect the data and move forward with that. As of right now, there isn’t one be-all, next identifier that’s going to replace the cookie. I think that’s one of the challenges — that there are multiple identifiers.”
Dome doesn’t believe that “the internet [will] die on the day the cookie goes away,” and is excited about what comes next.
“How are marketers and advertisers going to adapt to this? … [I]s it reaching your audiences on television through digital targeting? Is it reaching them on social?”
Well, it seems The Trade Desk and Proximic, a division of Comscore Inc., wants to answer Dome’s question. At least partly.
The two have partnered to provide political clients “a new suite of audience segments that reach users based on exposure to specific political campaigns and local TV exposure,” according to the companies.
Kevin Fisher, The Trade Desk’s business development GM, told C&E the collaboration is an attempt “to align the way that people are spending time watching TV with the way that political dollars should be spent.”
Sounds simple enough. But can it help address the ever-growing issue of ad saturation? Possibly. By integrating Comscore’s audience data, Fisher said his platform allows clients to “hit people who are streaming and have linear.”
“If you feel like you’ve reached your linear audience and you’re saturating them and you know that they’re also streaming at the same time, you can actually suppress those people and say, ‘I don’t want to target them because I know I’ve reached them already in broadcast [or] cable,’” Fisher said.
It also allows campaigns to “target based off of competitive investment,” which could be a huge advantage in the ever-murky world of digital/OTT/CTV competitives.
All in all, Fisher wanted political media buyers to know that the partnership represents a commitment by his company to the space — and not an attempt to “take all linear dollars.”
He added: “We just want to provide the data to all of the buyers that helps balance things out.”
