Publicis partners with The Trade Desk in latest alternative tracking move

The partnership will give The Trade Desk access to Epsilon consumer data

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Publicis Groupe, the global marketing and communications company, has announced a partnership with The Trade Desk to create another alternative to third-party cookie-based addressability.

The move will give The Trade Desk access to Epsilon’s database of billions of consumer transactions as well as household data, demographics and interests. Publicis acquired Epsilon from Alliance Data Systems in 2019 for $3.95 billion. Publicis clients will get access to The Trade Desk’s DSP to run digital campaigns.

Dig deeper: Sharing The Trade Desk’s Unified ID will not end adtech disruption.

Alternatives to cookies. The context for this partnership is, of course, the deprecation of third-party cookies, and the far from resolved question of what alternative routes to addressability will replace them.

The Trade Desk had already created Unified ID 2.0, in which a deterministic identifier like a hashed email tracks a consumer across the network of participating sites. This is just one of a growing number of alternative identifiers.

Google is set to offer FLoC, which replaces tracking of individual users with the tracking of interest and behavior-based cohorts, and has strongly hinted that FLoC-based addressability will be the only option available within the Google eco-system.

Dig deeper: FLoC’s threat to identity solutions.

Why we care. Another week, another partial solution to the problem of addressability outside the walled gardens. How many more initiatives and partnerships will we see? Given the Publicis Groupe’s ranking among agencies (top four), Epsilon’s ranking as one of the world’s largest data brokers, and The Trade Desk’s prominence as a DSP, this is an important one.


About the author

Kim Davis
Staff
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.

Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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