• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 23, 2018

The Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab has acquired DigiTrust, a nonprofit consortium of programmatic platforms that aims to offer a standardized identifier for ad targeting.

Jordan Mitchell, Founder and CEO of DigiTrust, will join IAB Tech Lab as senior vice president for membership and operations.

DigiTrust promotes its service as a means to reduce the presence of outside trackers by creating "an anonymous user token, designed to be propagated by and between its members," comparable to the Android or Apple mobile advertising identifiers.

"The primary goal for DigiTrust is to reduce the need for third-party requests on publisher pages as a result of pixel syncs, which slow down the consumer experience," DigiTrust says in a FAQ on its site. DigiTrust says its token doesn't enable new data collection or subsequent targeting.

DigiTrust currently counts around 30 programmatic platforms and 20 publishers as members. Fees for the platforms are either $5,000 a month or $2,500 a month, depending on the amount of managed media.

Mitchell says the service operates on a shared cost basis, meaning that fees are expected to decrease as more members join.

"Our operating model has been that the platforms fund this, because it saves them a lot of operating costs and headache," Mitchell says.

DigiTrust stores the token as a cookie; the token is also stored as a publisher's first-party cookie. If consumers opt out of targeted advertising, DigiTrust won't share the tokens with any companies. If people delete their cookies, DigiTrust's token will also be deleted.