Announcing the launch of the ID5 Universal ID

Since the concept of a universal advertising identifier was formalised in an IAB white paper entitled “The future of the cookie” in 2014, the industry has been trying to come up with a better way to identify users than by using 3rd party cookies. As external pressure mounts, with the walled gardens increasing their domination of the digital advertising market thanks to superior identification capabilities, and browsers and operating system manufacturers limiting ad tech’s ability to use 3rd party cookies, the need for a solution has become more urgent…

This is why I am very proud to announce that the ID5 Universal ID is now available to all publishers and ad tech platforms through a native Prebid integration. Any publisher using Prebid can turn on the ID5 module, retrieve an ID5 ID for every user visiting their site, store it in a first party cookie, and make it available free of charge to the SSPs and Exchanges integrated in their Prebid.js or Prebid Server wrapper. ID5 offers a truly open, neutral and privacy-compliant user ID to the entire ad tech ecosystem, creating massive opportunities to improve audience and inventory monetisation (by improving match rates), to reduce page latency (by eliminating the need to fire dozens of cookie matching pixels per page), and to guarantee access to consented data only (by centralising management of user consent at ID level).

When we launched ID5 just under 2 years ago, our sole ambition was to create a shared, commoditised, universally adopted user identification infrastructure. Following in the footsteps of Jordan Mitchell and the DigiTrust initiative (born from the 2014 IAB working group), but also of AppNexus’ Brian O’Kelley who created the Advertising ID Consortium with a similar goal in mind, we have focused our efforts on maximising our footprint and the adoption of our service, creating the foundation of a sustainable shared identity solution. Today, as ID5 reaches 2.5B users per month and works with almost 50 ad tech platforms globally, we believe that we have the scale and assets to help the industry move beyond proprietary IDs stored in 3rd party cookies, and onto a new identification infrastructure. 

User identification is not a challenge ID5 can solve on its own. We need the involvement of the independent ad tech world and the support of premium publishers, brands and agencies to turn this concept into a reality. The foundations are built, Universal ID is available, the benefits are clear...together, let’s reinvent user identification so that digital advertising can continue to support a free and open Internet!