Google’s back-and-forth stance on third-party cookies created a lot of uncertainty throughout the industry. Even though cookies are here to stay, they will be severely limited going forward due to the opt-in model and consumers’ growing demand for privacy.

In light of this cookie instability, brands and agencies need alternative, durable methods for addressing their desired audiences — methods that prioritize consumer privacy. Consumer touchpoints and omnichannel approaches are expanding; brands that can stitch together identity across channels will be able to deliver the most value to their customers — now and in the future.

The solution to cookie instability: durable, interoperable IDs. These identifiers will enable companies to gain a holistic view of each individual customer across channels and devices while ensuring privacy compliance.

Cookie Instability: Why it Matters

Between Google making third-party cookies optional for consumers and increasing privacy regulations across the U.S., access to advertising cookies will be severely limited in the future. Experts predict that between 70% and 80% of Chrome users will opt out of cookies; this new landscape creates a situation where cookies still exist, but they should not be relied on.

What Is Interoperable Identity?

As cookies become increasingly unreliable, marketers and advertisers will need to find more stable data points to become the core of their identity strategies. That’s where interoperable identity comes in.

Interoperable identity refers to the ability of different technology access points to exchange data and work together seamlessly. At its core, interoperable identity requires interoperable IDs that enable these different systems to communicate with each other.

Interoperability enables secure collaboration with data partners, a better understanding of individual customers, better attribution, maximized scalability, and more.

Examples of Durable, Interoperable IDs

Perhaps the most well-known example of these identifiers is The Trade Desk’s UID2. This identifier is developed by hashing and salting a phone number or email address. By converting personally identifiable information (PII) into hashed and salted identifiers, UID2 serves as a better, more privacy-focused building block of identity across the open internet.

Another example is the Deep Sync ID, which links offline data — like name, postal address, and phone number — to online data — like MAIDs, UID2s, hashed emails, and IP addresses. By linking offline and online identifiers, the Deep Sync ID can help create singular, unified customer profiles and tie individuals to households. Furthermore, the Deep Sync ID persists throughout consumer life changes, such as changes in address or household.

While UID2 represents an individual’s email or phone number, the Deep Sync ID represents a person or household. The interoperable nature of these IDs allows them to work together to create a strong sense of identity, enabling effective precision, scale, durability, and omnichannel targeting ability.

The Need for Durable, Interoperable IDs

For interoperability to be possible, brands need durable identifiers, built from a deterministic identity spine. Durable, interoperable IDs can be used to recognize users consistently across various devices, apps, internal databases, and websites — while maintaining consumer privacy and compliance with regulations. Although many of these identifiers are relatively new, their impact will continue to grow as the industry adapts to cookie instability.

These IDs are a privacy-conscious way for advertisers to better understand consumer behavior across channels and platforms. They use unique, persistent data points — like a phone number or an email address — to create an anonymous identifier. Because these identifiers are both persistent and anonymous, they enable interoperability but do not share potentially sensitive information with advertisers, publishers, data collaborations, or ad tech platforms.

The Benefits of Interoperable IDs

Identifiers that can be used across channels and platforms improve audience reach, attribution, activation, and privacy compliance.

Reach. The ability to recognize users across all touchpoints enables personalized advertising to continue at scale. With a better understanding of individual customers, brands can engage them with relevant content at the right time.

Attribution. Interoperable IDs make it possible to measure outcomes by providing a more holistic view of consumer activity across channels. This enables marketers and advertisers to identify which campaign or channel influenced a customer’s purchase decision.

Activation. Interoperable identifiers allow advertisers to activate audiences across a campaign, no matter where it runs. For example, Enhanced Onboarding uses identifiers to enable more effective offline-to-online onboarding for campaign activation — boosting match rates.

Privacy Compliance. Interoperable identifiers can anonymize personal information, so sensitive consumer data is not shared with advertising platforms or data partners.

Conclusion: The Future of Digital Identity

Data services like identity resolution, as well as the use of identity graphs and data clean rooms, enable identity interoperability by using persistent identifiers to take fragmented pieces of consumer information and connect them to a comprehensive profile of that consumer. These processes form a more complete view of the individual and/or household.

However, most companies do not have the option to create durable identifiers in-house. As a result, third-party data partners are needed to match customer profiles across different identifiers to tie durable IDs to an individual.

This article was originally published in the Association of National Advertisers’ Marketing Knowledge Center: “Cookie Instability and the Need for Durable, Interoperable IDs“