How to Pick an Identifier to Navigate the Ad Industry’s Cookieless Future

The decline of the media industry’s traditional means of ad targeting and measurement, such as third-party cookies or mobile IDS (MAIDs), has given rise to a glut of alternative tools to help marketers engage intended audiences.

Accompanying this has been a tsunami of sales pitches, each of these alternative solutions promising to help brands’ marketing departments meet ever-growing privacy requirements while demonstrating a return on ad spend just as cookies, etcetera did in the past.

The market isn’t so much faced with an “identity crisis” as it is with a quandary over which identity tools best fit their needs, according to several studies. Although with such an array of offerings inundating the market ahead of Google’s latest 2024 deadline for cookie deletion, it’s essential for marketers to know how to kick the tires in a robust manner.

Digiday spoke with several industry insiders to devise the below guide on how to gauge the right solution for their company’s needs.

1. Start with privacy: Can I probe the data’s provenance?

The first step is to ensure with any vendor that their data is adequately consented. Liz Salway, principal, business consulting at EPAM Systems, advised marketers to probe where an ID-vendors’ data is coming from, ask for guarantees over its genesis, compliance with requisite privacy laws — and how often it’s updated.

“All identity ‘solutions’ claim to have the widest penetration and most privacy-compliant way of working,” she added, “managing a privacy-compliant interaction with the media ecosystem has to sit squarely with the brand — while they may not be accountable for any missteps that happen, they are responsible.”

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