The Cookieless World: New Identity Solutions

Have you heard the news? The future is cookieless, and it’s coming up fast—in the second half of 2024, to be precise!

To prepare for a world without third-party cookies, it’s important that members of the advertising industry embrace new ideas and collaboration. The success of any identity solution is heavily dependent on scale, and so partnering with an independent owner of a solution with the most scale—or, better yet, partnering with multiple—is likely to be the best option when the dust settles. Working as a group, evaluating options, and sharing principles is the best course we can take to minimize the impact on customers.

With that in mind, here’s a look at three groups working toward innovative identity solutions:

IAB Project Rearc

In February 2020, the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced Project Rearc, a global initiative designed to get stakeholders across the digital advertising and media supply chain together to re-architect digital marketing in a consolidated effort to harmonize personalization and consumer privacy. And in June 2022, as part of this initiative, IAB Tech Lab released its Global Privacy Platform, a mechanism for transmitting consumer choice signals from websites and mobile apps to advertising technology companies.

Along with other industry leaders, Basis has been an active participant in Project Rearc—reviewing the proposals, evaluating specs, and providing feedback. It proposes rigorous technical standards and guidelines that inform how companies collect and use such an identifier so that:

• Consumers are in control of the use of the ID and any related data. Any privacy preferences attached to the identifier are strictly followed.
• The identifier is sufficiently encrypted so that it cannot be reverse engineered to identify the person.
• Brands and publishers have auditable, technical assurances that third-party vendors cannot track consumers on this basis without explicit consent.
• Third-party vendors are able to execute on behalf of trusted first parties, without compromising any of the above objectives.
• Advertisers utilize standardized consumer-facing messaging, and accountability mechanisms that ascertain responsible privacy practices.

LiveRamp RampID

LiveRamp introduced IdentityLink in 2016. The technology, now known as RampID, allows resolving hundreds of different identifiers for consumers used on devices and marketing platforms in a privacy-compliant manner. It doesn’t matter if data is offline or online, first-party CRM or third-party behavioral, online exposure data or mobile app download data—all of it can be tied back to a unique, privacy-safe identifier at the consumer level.

Unified ID 2.0

Unified ID 2.0 (or UID 2.0) is an open-source ID framework that uses hashed and encrypted email addresses. This ID will remain open and universal, while introducing upgrades to consumer privacy and transparency. Unlike other solutions in the works, UID 2.0 is free to publishers and advertisers. UID 2.0 will operate across advertising channels, giving advertisers insight into campaign performance across streaming TV, browsers, mobile, audio, and TV apps and devices.

The four principles under which UID 2.0 operates are:

1) Open source and interoperable: The ID framework will be open source and available for free for everyone.

2) Optimum security: Emails will be hashed and encrypted to prevent abuse. Regular rotation of decryption keys will help enforce accountability measures.

3) Independently governed: Participants will agree to a code of conduct, and the UID2 Compliance Manager will audit all participating UID2 parties to determine their compliance, relaying the results to UID2 administrators and operators.

4) User transparency and privacy controls: Consumers will be able to easily view and manage their preferences and opt out at any time.

A bright future

The digital media ecosystem is a dynamic one, with new methodologies, tools, and opportunities emerging every day. The third-party cookie has been a protagonist for the last 20 years, but it’s not the only character in this story. And with the third-party cookie going the way of MySpace, we are at the dawn of a new era for adtech—one filled with opportunity and room for innovation in the way we connect with our audiences.

Advertisers who focus on making the most of their first-party data and cookieless media alternatives, optimizing campaigns based on real-time learnings, and embracing identity solutions that are high-performing and privacy compliant are sure to be well-positioned for the cookieless future.

As we go through these changes together, it’s important that industry players stay committed to working together, listening to the market, collaborating with regulatory bodies, adapting and developing new products, and keeping customers/users abreast of changes as they develop. If we can do that, we’ll all emerge from a place of strength and primed for success in our new, cookieless world.

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Want to learn more about how to embrace the cookieless future? Check out Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis.