Mathieu Roche is Founder and CEO of ID5. We spoke to him to understand his company’s approach to solving challenges surrounding the user ID:

Tell us a little bit about ID5 - a brief company history, and the problem you are trying to solve?

ID5 was created to solve the issues caused by user synchronisation and ultimately provide the programmatic ecosystem with a “unified language” to identify users.

User identification based on 3rd party cookies is inefficient and won’t be available for long: 3rd party cookies are temporary and only apply to a device and a browser. They are also domain specific which means that ad tech platforms need to match cookies with each other in order to share user data, which creates inefficiencies and impacts publisher websites and campaign performances. And on top of that, browsers are also limiting the access to 3rd party cookies as a way to protect users’ privacy.

This is why ID5 has created a privacy-first identity infrastructure that enables publishers and platforms to limit their reliance on 3rd party cookies, operate more efficiently and to increase programmatic revenue.

What is the rate of adoption of your solution, and where do you expect to be 12 months from now? 

ID5 works with nearly 60 ad tech platforms globally and our Universal ID is distributed by over 5000 websites around the world. In just 2 years, our footprint has grown to over 2.5 billion devices per month and we’re pretty much at scale in Europe and North America. Over the next 12 months, we plan to roll out to publishers in other parts of the world such as LATAM and APAC, but also to convince more ad tech platforms to use ID5 as a standard to identify users.

-Is online identity a ‘one ring to rule them all’ problem, or can multiple offerings co-exist in future? What are the potential downsides/upsides, if that does happen? 

We believe that identity works better if it’s a shared commodity instead of someone’s competitive advantage. We think that a handful of identity solutions would be the ideal future scenario. Moving from hundreds of proprietaries IDs to four or five shared identifiers will provide a significant improvement over the existing situation, and offer the benefits that come with open competition to all industry players.

The challenges around cookies right now are pretty well documented. Could you explain how your solution is different - i.e. is it also cookie-driven, and if so, is that a sustainable, long-term solution? 

The ID5 Universal ID is a 1st party identifier, which means that it works even in environments where 3rd party cookies are restricted. Using 3rd party identifiers is problematic because they can only be stored on 3rd party cookies, which are becoming less and less available. ID5 is offering a solution to the industry to migrate from 3rd party, platform-specific IDs to a neutral, shared ID infrastructure. And because ID5 is completely neutral (we are not involved in media or data trading) and completely focused on identity management, we can be more aggressive in our go-to-market strategy.

IDs in general are first party cookie based, please outline to us why the first party cookie is more sustainable than the third-party cookie. 

Publishers will always need a way to store some user data in order to make their browsing experience more enjoyable. Today, they store data such as login tokens, or user preferences in 1st party cookies. Browsers will have a tough time removing this ability without providing a new mechanism that allows publishers to store such data. At the end of the day, the ID being stored is just an arbitrary string that the publisher would like to keep for a user, so how does the browser differentiate between that and the login token?

Please could you outline how your solution is privacy-friendly, and handles GDPR? And more specifically, how do you handle opt-ins/outs from individual users? 

At ID5 we have built a privacy-by-design and GDPR-compliant service. Our Universal ID leverages IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework to capture user consent signals, which allows us to ensure that users’ preferences are respected throughout the programmatic value chain. If a user opts out, we will never return a Universal ID for them back to the browser, so it won’t be usable by the ecosystem.

What are the implications of the IAB’s TCF 2.0 and how are you adapting to comply with it?

The TCF v2.0 is an important milestone for the digital advertising industry. The new version includes many features that improve control for publishers and enhance transparency to users, including more clearly defined purposes, publisher vendor restrictions, the ability to define legitimate interest as a legal basis, and support for out-of-band legal basis. As an industry, it’s important that we all support the new version and take advantage of its improvements. As mentioned above, our Universal ID and user syncing services leverage IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework.

What does a publisher or a DSP/buyer respectively need to do in order to activate with your ID solution. 

Publishers need to retrieve the Universal ID and make it available to their SSP partners - either via a configuration in Prebid or by installing the ID5 API.

DSPs need to listen to the Universal ID on bid requests and be able to transact against it. 

We have detailed integration guides for publishers, SSPs, and DSPs that are interested in learning more about how to implement the ID5 Universal ID.

Apple suggested recently that anyone 'web-tracking Safari users will be treated like hacking' are you in conversation with Apple, and how do you intend to avoid being tarred with this brush?

We are not in direct conversation with Apple, but we support organisation such as the IAB Tech Lab who are trying to engage with them. We only enable tracking when the user has explicitly consented to it. That means there is no “hacking” because the user has clearly indicated their preferences.

Finally, lots of the conversation around ID right now in the industry focuses on the businesses inside it - and solving their problems. Is there enough consideration right now around the user - what solutions will make navigating GDPR a better experience for them - and how they are incentivised to opt-in to profiling?

Our focus has always been to bring benefit to publishers and to their users. Our goal is to remove the cookie syncing mess from websites, which will have a positive impact on the user experience. By improving identification abilities for the ecosystem, users can receive more relevant ads, which also improve their on-site experience.

It’s important that we clearly communicate the value exchange between publishers and users: users get free content in exchange for better (more targetable, attributable) advertising, which is what enables publishers to monetise their websites.