• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 8, 2021

Nearly two years after it acquired big consumer data platform Epsilon for more than $4 billion, Publicis is making a play to integrate it into the primary platform used by Madison Avenue to process programmatic and data-driven media buys: The Trade Desk.

Publicis this morning announced a deal with The Trade Desk -- used by most, if not, all, of the big agency-holding company media-buying units to manage their programmatic buys, to “bring interoperability” between Epsilon’s consumer identity platform and the “Unified ID 2.0” alternative to third-party cookie targeting developed by The Trade Desk.

It wasn’t clear from this morning’s announcement how proprietary the deal is, because Unified ID 2.0 is an open source industry initiative, but in a statement, Publicis said it will help facilitate access to Epsilon’s “250 million transaction-verified” consumer identities in order to “create a next-generation personalized media platform, powered by real identities and fueled by Publicis Media’s leadership position in the United States.”

Since big digital platforms such as Google and others have announced steps that will sunset the practical use of “third-party” web browser cookies, most enterprising data and ad-tech enterprises have announced plans or intentions to come up with solutions, and as a concept, the Unified ID 2.0 has taken the most hold.

Now Publicis is leveraging it to assert Epsilon as a marketplace solution, noting that it will achieve two important goals:

One, enabling Publicis’s clients to utilize Epsilon’s IDs through The Trade Desk to target people "across display, video, social, connected TV, native and audio."

Secondly, making The Trade Desk "the exclusive DSP partner" for Epsilon’s consumer identity targeting.