• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Truthset’s recent integration with Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), an open-source, privacy-focused identifier designed by The Trade Desk (TTD), aims to allow advertisers to find authenticated audiences across the open internet for brands.

Through the integration, media buyers can match Truthset’s "Data Rated Audiences" with UID2s on a one-on-one basis for more accurate activation across authenticated publisher inventory, including connected TV (CTV), mobile, and web.

The Data Rated Audiences will soon become available in TTD’s marketplace. Advertisers can buy unbundled audiences, and are able to use only the most accurate data sources to assemble in the TTD marketplace.

“We’re leveling out programmatic, so it looks a lot like a walled garden,” Scott McKinley, Truthset CEO, told MediaPost. He did say CPG brands are using this today, without identifying the companies’ names. Publishers include Paramount, and TelevisaUnivision.

The collaboration means giving advertisers validated audiences based on human I.D.s -- just like walled gardens -- and aims to give publishers higher yields.

Deterministic data is used to target, but the platforms looks to identify and remove as many data points as possible to reduce uncertainty.

That’s where the Data Collective comes in, with about 25 data providers that allow Truthset to run algorithms across their data to look for disagreements in how the data matches.

These audiences are multi-sourced from participating members of the Truthset Data Collective, and independently scored for accuracy, helping marketers reduce wasted spending to improve performance and profitability.

McKinley said the integration reduces “mistargeting” through the company’s independent Data Ratings scale.

“We are dealing with people I.D.’s, not 20 million device I.D. that may not map to people at all,” he said.

Targeting and measurement “should be addressable and measurable, much like direct mail,” McKinley told MediaPost. “Today, it’s a noise machine. Advertisers hope to squeeze some signal out of it.”

Before founding Truthset in 2019, McKinley spent more than 20 years in advertising technology. He worked at Nielsen for seven years, and was an executive vice president during that period. It’s there that he led global products and helped to launch the Nielsen Innovation Lab.

McKinley took Nielsen’s approach in TV, and built out services based on what he calls “objective measurement.” He wanted to build this type of technology within Nielsen and believed it it would eventually be considered a monopoly. 

TTD has been questioned lately, in terms of whether the company can compete with others like Amazon. McKinley said this is just another tool in the company’s wheelhouse.