Amazon Web Services Inks Partnership With Trade Desk Over UID2 Cookieless Solution

Amazon Web Services, one of the most popular data hosting services for marketers, is joining forces with the Unified ID 2.0, an open-sourced alternative identifier developed by The Trade Desk and supported by over 40 publishers. The partnership, announced today at the Cannes Lions Festival, allows AWS to act as a private operator of UID2. This essentially means that marketers can directly integrate their first-party data, if they house it with AWS, along with publisher data, minting UID2 tokens without intermediary steps. AWS joins a handful of other data firms and agency networks—like Snowflake, InfoSum and IPG—who have signed up to be private operators of UID2, or parties that process identifiable information in a way The Trade Desk deems privacy safe. “[This] demonstrates how easy it is to store data in a private and secure way, such that none of that customer data is leaving that ecosystem,” said Samantha Jacobson, chief strategy officer at The Trade Desk. The partnership serves as a boon for both UID2 and AWS. UID2 is now easier to adopt for the vast swath of marketers using Amazon Web Services, which will help the solution gain credibility in the crowded cookieless replacement landscape. By providing another service directly through its platform, AWS becomes stickier to marketers, which, unlike UID2, marketers pay for. But given that many marketers and publishers lack first-party data—and the sheer number of cookie replacements that exist—the partnership does not make the future of identity any less murky, several sources told Adweek. IPG Announces It Will Join UID2 as Its First Closed Operator Data matching Advertisers will be able to seamlessly integrate their data housed on AWS with UID2 via a technology called Nitro Enclaves. The technology works by finding matches between the publishers’ and marketers’ sensitive, encrypted data. “If the token matches, I can buy against it,” Jacobson said, taking the point of view of the advertiser. “If the two don’t match, I don’t know who that is.” While this might sound like clean room technology, it is fundamentally different because data doesn’t travel from different places to enter the same container. Instead, via Nitro Enclaves, marketers’ consumer data never has to leave the place it is stored, Jacobson said. The reality is a lot of marketers don’t have first-party data … the actionability of the data will not be as high.Nancy Marzouk, founder of MediaWallah The partnership saves marketers time and protects their consumers’ privacy, said Ana Milicevic, co-founder of programmatic consultancy Sparrow Advisors. “When you’re collecting data from your own CRM or data off your website, that data has to go somewhere. More often than not, it goes into an AWS,” Milicevic said. “If I wanted to work with a demand-side platform [to bid for an impression via an identity solution], I would have to physically ship the file to ingest into their system.” “This is a pretty big cost-saver but it’s also a privacy security measure, meaning that if your data is not physically going anywhere, you can restrict access to it pretty well,” Milicevic added. The industry standard? While two titans of ad-tech may be joining forces, industry sources expressed skepticism that UID2 powered by Amazon would automatically become the industry standard. UID2 still lacks massive scale—having lost its head start in the alternative identifier field—and advertisers are behind in collecting their own first-party datasets that the solution needs to work, said Nancy Marzouk, founder of identity-focused ad-tech company MediaWallah. “It’s great they’re making UID2 available for people who use AWS,” Marzouk said. “The reality is a lot of marketers don’t have first-party data … the actionability of the data will not be as high.” UID2 distinguishes itself from other identity solutions by being free. Still, if UID2 relies more heavily on private operators to implement its technology, it risks undermining its open-source ethos, said Alex Cone, an advisor to the IAB Tech Lab, who is currently working on a new digital privacy venture. UID2 is currently controlled by non-profit trade organization Prebid, after publishers expressed concern that The Trade Desk—which, for the most part, is a buy-side platform representing marketer interest—might not govern the technology fairly. Jacobson said the partnership is about meeting advertisers where they are. “Whatever tools they’re using …. We want to make sure they’re able to plug in, so they always have access to that ID space for their business needs,” she said. This article was updated to reflect that The Trade Desk does not own or manage UID2.