• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, September 19, 2013

Lost in the headlines about news that Google is readying a new non-cookie based method for tracking consumers and targeting and serving ads to them, is the fact that the initiative’s name -- AdID -- is already the registered trademark of an institution that takes trademarks, brand names and identities pretty seriously: Madison Avenue.

Ad-ID, of course, is a joint-venture of the Association of National Advertisers and the 4As, that markets a digital coding technology for identifying and managing all advertising assets -- including creative, production and media -- across all the platforms advertisers and agencies need to manage them on.

The 4As and the ANA have fought a long, hard battle to get compliance for Ad-ID, and now have the majority of major advertisers, as well as their marketing services food chain, supporting it. And last year, MEDIA magazine named Ad-ID it’s “Marketer of the Year” for those efforts.

“Based on everything we have seen, Google has only informally used the Ad-ID name for its "anonymous identifier for advertising" project,” Ad-ID Chief Growth Officer Harold Geller tells MAD, adding, that it is a “registered trademark of Advertiser Digital Identification LLC,” the official joint-venture entity.

“I'm certain once the product naming gurus at Google discover that, they will establish a name that will not create industry confusion,” Geller hopes.