• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 9, 2021

Experian-owned Tapad, which provides cross-device identity resolution, launched an interoperable solution on Tuesday to support advertisers across the cookieless landscape.

Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, connects new cookieless identifiers to traditional digital IDs to gain a complete view of consumers at each digital point in the customer’s research and purchase process.

The biggest challenge has been a lack of connection between IDs. “We believe there will be a lot of fragmentation around identity to target ads, as we evolve away from cookies,” said Mark Connon, General Manager of Tapad. “It lets us map together cookieless IDs within the graph, so our customers can still identify their customers.”  

The goal is to provide a privacy-safe interoperable solution in the absence of third-party cookies across the growing number of digital identifiers to support data exchange between publishers, content creators and consumers. 

Unified ID 2.0, ID5, Lotame Panorama ID, BritePool, Retargetly IDx, and Audigent Halo ID are among the Identify solution launch partners. Tapad plans to expand support to additional Identity solutions in the future. 

Other early partners include The Trade Desk, Amobee, Martin, ShareThis, Eyeota, and Catalina. These companies would transact on the identifiers, and look for the identifiers within their own platforms.

Connon said the company works with known IDs from demand-side platforms, brands, agencies, and publishers. Many of the identifiers are based off first-party data or a hashed email turned into an identifier.

“Today, we still have cookies and mobile ad IDs in our graph, but as the world transitions away, we will link cookieless IDs to our graph with existing identifiers,” he said.

The task has been creating interoperability to follow privacy and regulatory guidelines and requirements. All have been top of mind through this process, he said.

Switchboard has been designed to solve industry challenges by creating a streamlined solution for Cookieless ID providers to syndicate their solutions for Tapad customers who license The Tapad Graph.

Unifying several different cookieless vendors to provide one view of identity at the household and individual level would otherwise be a very difficult task because of the variability of methodology and data across vendors.

“We’re not doing this to create some uber ID of our own, but rather reduce fragmentation,” Connon said. “We work to connect other’s IDs.”