Its universal identity initiative aims to overcome challenges posed by the demise of third-party cookies and other platform identifiers

Global customer intelligence platform zeotap announces the launch of ID+, its universal identity initiative that aims to empower the marketing ecosystem to overcome challenges posed by the demise of third-party cookies and other platform identifiers, as well as a fast-changing regulatory landscape. The ID+ project is an open invitation to the entire industry to collaborate on a collective vision for the future. More than 20 global, regional and local organisations have confirmed their public support and adoption of ID+, including Accenture, Annalect, International Business Times (IBT), Imágen Digital, ItaliaOnline, Mediasmart, OMD EMEA, Prensa Ibérica, PubMatic, S4M and Tabmo.

Identity resolution remains one of the fundamental needs of brand marketers. According to a report published by BCG in 2019, 83% of CMOs and advertisers are still not able to make connections across consumer touchpoints and devices. Separately, a report published by Google last year reveals publishers lose an average of 52% of revenue (62% in the news vertical) when third-party cookies are disabled. Keeping these and other challenges in mind, ID+ has been designed to endow the marketing ecosystem ––brands, publishers, agencies and technology platforms alike–– with a privacy-compliant mechanism to overcome identity resolution challenges arising from ID fragmentation, cookie restrictions and increasingly stringent regulation across the world.

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“The launch of ID+ is a major step for zeotap and an industry facing an uncertain future. For a ‘universal ID’ to gain widespread adoption and claim true universality it needs a multilateral governance model. Nobody wants to see one duopoly give way to another,” said Projjol Banerjea, founder & CPO at zeotap. “We decided to take the initiative and were very encouraged by the resoundingly positive feedback we received from our partners. It’s evident we all agree the best way to predict the future is to create it. Together.”

ID+ has been conceived on four core tenets:
1. Independence: It does not rely on cookies, MAIDs or any platform identifiers. Instead, it’s based on deterministic offline identifiers and is valid across all platforms and channels.
2. Simplicity: It can be adopted easily and works as a standalone first-party identity layer as well as in conjunction with homegrown or other solutions.
3. Interoperability: It is available to connect with all other (universal) ID solutions.
4. Compliance: Every ID+ record has consent traceability baked into it, and data protection is ensured via tokenization.

“Annalect has built the Omni platform with identity and interoperability at its core and we have remained the industry leader in this approach. By combining interoperability with a hyper-focus on user consent and privacy, zeotap’s ID+ seamlessly integrates with Omni, and enhances our ability to drive personalization at scale for our client brands across the globe,” said Timothy Petrycki, Global VP of Data Strategy at Annalect in New York.

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ID+ has been initially launched as an extension to zeotap’s identity resolution solution that is built on the back of the world’s largest marketing identity graph, available across North America, Latin America, Europe, and India. However, in the spirit of collaboration, and in keeping with the founding principles, zeotap encourages members of the industry to join the effort to grow the solution across platforms, channels and geographies.

“As the importance of building a diversified approach to persistent identity in the open web increases, and clients look to shore up their approach to identity, we’re proud to be working with zeotap on its ID+ initiative,” added Miles Pritchard, Managing Partner at OMD in London.

“There’s a world of difference between good and bad marketing, and identity resolution is at the epicenter of it. Having built Hawk platform, mobile-first, omnichannel buy-side technology, ID+ will be instrumental in this endeavor of linking users across devices,” said Renaud Biet, Co-Founder at Tabmo, a mobile and new screens ad tech specialist.

For brands, ID+ provides a solution to resolve identities accurately and at scale for effective omnichannel marketing. In addition to serving elemental marketing use cases such as onboarding and activation, as well as increasing adoption in analytics, it also sees embryonic application in critical areas such as multi-touch attribution (MTA).

“We are proud to support our partner zeotap in an initiative that will drive the ecosystem forward in a way that respects customer privacy,” echoed Noelia Amoedo, CEO at Mediasmart, a Spanish mobile programmatic platform and part of Affle, a publicly-traded Indian consumer intelligence company.

“Being able to accurately track opted-in users across devices is a must-have for the advertising industry if we want to continue providing users with personalised, engaging and relevant advertising content. S4M is delighted to work with zeotap to implement ID+ in our drive-to-store platform,” said Nicolas Saraiva, SVP Strategic Partnerships at S4M, a digital-to-physical advertising company headquartered in France.

For publishers, ID+ is not only a compelling solution to ensure their revenue models remain unaffected by upcoming changes, but an important step to leverage their first-party data to provide value-added options to discerning marketers.

“The ID+ of zeotap couldn’t have come at a better time. In a world where privacy is a prime concern, cookie-less user identity resolution, touch-point and device mapping in a privacy-regulation-friendly way is vital. We wish zeotap the best,” said Chandra Mohan, Managing Director at IBT India.

“ID+ will bring a lot of value to an industry that’s looking for ways to solve an identity challenge that affects every player in the advertising value chain. We’re happy to partner with zeotap and become one of the first publishers to try out the user identification infrastructure they have put in place,” added Alfredo Martell, Director General at Imagen Digital in Mexico.

Zeotap has also partnered with leading consent management Platforms (CMPs), including Usercentrics in Germany, to encourage the integration of different consent collection tools and methods into the ID+ solution.

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