The dawn of online advertising wasn’t based on IDs. That was the dawn of programmatic advertising. And if agency holding companies have anything to say about it, their acquisitions of data providers over the last few years indicates IDs – or any form of match keys – isn’t going away anytime soon. Regardless of where you sit with regard to views on privacy, tracking, cookies, and IDs, one thing is clear: buyers and sellers are always looking for information that helps them achieve their objectives while also giving them an edge over competitors. As such, we should not be so hasty to force the market towards any one matching solution – or id-less – based solution over another. Let the market decide.
Advocates for ID-less solutions argue that the open web should be turned on its head and vendors up and down the ecosystem should fall in line to change their methodology to one rooted in publisher-based identity signals and/or ID-less signals. But why advocate for the demise of one effective solution that already has widespread standardization, in favor of unmoderated, proprietary solutions that add to complexity and potential lock-in? Especially both buyers and sellers of media need more choice, not less. To be clear, the use of publisher-based identity can be a valuable instrument for advertising, but to place the blame on the current underpinning of the ecosystem for things like fraud or data leakage is a cheap shot. It’s like blaming cars for bank robberies, when only a small fraction are ever used as getaway vehicles. Advertisers aren’t addicted to IDs. They’re addicted to results.
It doesn’t matter if you’re using cookies or cohorts; matching through cookies or clean rooms. All of the arguments boil down to value. If you want to accurately value and optimize media, you need consistency and trust in the measurement methodology — fortunately, we already have a marketplace of vendors for this very purpose. If you want value in terms of effectiveness, buyers will naturally adopt the solutions that offer the best outcome at the lowest possible price. Most media buyers call this “return on ad spend.” Media sellers can suggest buyers should not care about returns, but all successful businesses care about the features that appeal to their customers. We can talk about MFA or fraud all day long, but ID-less solutions just shift the burden somewhere else. Buyers that want to limit their exposure already have the tools to do so; just as publishers that want to maximize their value and protect their audience can do so by focusing on their content, their tech partners, and their sales strategies.
The very distinction between 1st vs 3rd party cookies were the first shots by Google and Apple trying to disrupt the open marketplace. The next were Google’s “planned” degradation of cookies and the debacle that is the Privacy Sandbox. Rather than concede and embrace the complexity of upending an entire marketplace, buyers and sellers would do well to review and embrace the solutions – ID-less or otherwise – that ultimately drive results.
At the end of the day, this choice doesn’t need to be binary. Proponents of ID-less solutions believe that their success can only be achieved by removing competition in the form of IDs. We disagree. In a competitive market all solutions should be free to succeed or fail on their merits. If advertisers choose ID-less solutions en masse because they deliver better results, then IDs will naturally wither away over time, but it should be for the market to decide, not for the vendors of ID-less technologies.