Proposal: People-based Cross-Device Identifier in the bid stream

[Rishi Desai]

Hi All, 

This is a proposal for including a single cross-device identifier in the user object of the bid request. 

The proposal calls for the supply and demand side to communicate using a cross-device people-based identifier. Given the general move towards the people-based marketing the open ecosystem would benefit from using such an identifier in programmatic ad buys. It would allow marketers to reach the right user across multiple devices / online touch points thereby improving cross-channel targeting, measurement, and overall media ROI. 

In terms of adoption/usage, several DSPs are currently using cross device graphs for decisioning. Adding such an identifier to the spec should promote people-based marketing and enable the open ecosystem to effectively compete against the walled gardens. 

Here is the proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P7yX1KGBIFQU0QKBtMkeaBVhZkRIjcdM6Ry2XZMuyQg/edit#heading=h.py2szjjv033v

Look forward to comments

Regards,

Rishi

[Daniel Bowman]

I think we're still in the early days of understanding how most DSPs are going to buy against people IDs, and from my point of view, I'm not sure the proliferation of people IDs provided by the supply side is a good thing unless we get to basically the equivalent of a mobile advertising ID - consistent across all supply sources and globally available. Potentially this is an end point for digitrust or similar but we're quite some way from that at the moment.

Most DSPs need to have their own cross device partner to get any use out of cross device data - tieing a conversion back to an impression pretty much demands that. It's going to be almost always preferable for DSPs to rely on the buyer uid or raw cookie ID mapped through to their own graph.

There are also privacy and data concerns that I could see preventing any SSP from ever using that field. Once a determinsitic cross device match is released through the SSP it can never be taken back - it would be basically pointless for a DSP to ever do a deal again with a deterministic provider. In fact, all it takes is for one large SSP to consistenyl provide person IDs and that can then be used across all of them

Are person IDs actively being sent by any SSPs as extension fields and used by any DSPs? I would definitely like to see that happen before the spec is extended to incorporate something that I suspect is largely redundant and has the potential to stifle the people matching industry rather than promote it if it is ever adopted..

Thanks,
Daniel

[Steve Truxal]

I think the idea here is that the DSP is already making use of a particular vendor's xdevice graph for conversion attribution, and getting those IDs in the bidstream would be very beneficial and prevent needing to look up the xdevice identifier in a big table. 

Appnexus is supportive of the spec. we'll likely start testing in extensions. 

[Rishi Desai]

Thanks Steve. 

Yes, that is the idea. 

Given that the typical user today owns multiple devices, the buyerid / id fields in the User Object are quite limiting to track the cross-device and cross-channel user journeys. 

Having a mechanism to pass multiple identifiers in the bid request would enable buyers to better inform their bidding (targeting/attribution) by resolving several fragmented ids for the said user into a single id. This would benefit both buyers and sellers.

[Thomas Packer, PhD]

All

Rishi asked me to consider posting my comment to the thread here.  

My suggestion was to include the probability or confidence of an identity decision, (regardless of the type of algorithm used to determine identity, wether it be a probabilistic or a deterministic algorithm).  This could be applied downstream to avoid using low confidence data in cases when high confidence is required.  

Thomas Packer