Flashtalking is the world’s first ad server to function—by design—without cookies and unify client identity for measurement and personalization. IDConnect provides digital marketers with the flexibility to specify their preferred customer identifier to be used within the Flashtalking platform from the following options:
First-Party ID:
An online retailer with a vast store of authenticated online users will likely define identity in terms of its own first-party identifier.
Partner’s PREFERRED ID:
A financial services company owns significant first-party data assets but requires the assistance of an identity data partner (e.g., Merkury, Epsilon, Acxiom) to connect that data across their digital customer experiences. In these instances, it may choose to define identity in terms of the partner identifier.
FTrack ID:
A CPG company does not own any significant pools of first-party IDs. In the absence of a preferred identity data partner, it decides to define identity with the FTrack ID.
IDConnect will then use this chosen identifier to orchestrate a single view of identity to support measurement and creative personalization—all without the need for cookies.
Measurement
For the measurement use case, IDConnect generates a unified dataset that stitches together the various identifiers from across the Identityscape on each ad impression, click and conversion. In essence, it provides the advertiser with a “Rosetta Stone” for orchestrating identity. Here is a simplified explanation of how it works:
When an ad is served, IDConnect starts by recording the advertiser’s preferred customer identifier.
This could be the first-party ID, partner’s preferred ID or FTrack ID.With the identity of the consumer established, IDConnect gathers the other IDs involved in the buy.
This could include IDs from the DSP, DMP, OTT platform, verification partner and/or data partners.This same process is repeated for every recorded impression, click and conversion.
The Analytics team can then use the preferred identifier (i.e. first-party ID, partner’s preferred ID or FTrack ID) to assemble complete customer journeys and perform accurate reach, frequency and attribution analyses. Collected verification data can be used to filter out invalid traffic and non-viewable impressions to further improve the fidelity.
Personalization
Many of the most popular personalization use cases (e.g. geo, weather, dayparting) have never used cookies and, therefore, are unaffected by cookies going away. For those personalization use cases that do rely on cookies (A/B testing, sequential messaging, remarketing, third-party audience messaging), IDConnect can execute these use cases in a cookieless manner using the advertiser’s preferred identifier (first-party ID, partner’s preferred ID, FTrack ID). The preferred identifier is passed to Flashtalking on the ad call where it is used to inform the personalization decision. In fact, we expect these use cases to perform even better than with the degraded cookie pools the market has operated under for the past few years.
In case you missed it, read the last blog post in this series, Part 6: Identity Building Block 2 - The Privacy Icon.
Our next blog post, Part 8: Advertiser Identity Strategies, will break down different identity strategies and how to identify which works best for you.
