Disney joins Amazon in getting behind Unified ID 2.0

If you were wondering why people have been going on about first-party data, it’s these kinds of developments: Disney Advertising is adopting The Trade Desk’s open-source identity framework, Unified ID 2.0, which will allow advertisers to find their audiences among Disney’s data and target them across Disney’s inventory.

Why it matters

For a partial, but also quite clear, explanation of what this means, look to Tim Sims, The Trade Desk’s chief revenue officer, who suggested “we are unlocking the opportunity for our customers to activate their first-party data at scale, programmatically, against some of the world’s most premium content, across all channels.”

Effectively, the story is good news for Disney, an advertising giant which has Netflix’s coming entrance into the the ad-supported streaming arena to contend with, and is obviously good news for Unified ID 2.0, which gains even greater credibility.

What is Unified ID 2.0?

Unified ID 2.0 is what is known as a deterministic ID, or a third party-solution (here that third party is the Trade Desk, though Unified ID 2.0 is open-sourced) based on authenticated email addresses, which are then encrypted.

As WARC explained in last year’s Guide to the Future of Identity, its pros include tracking capabilities and built-in privacy. Its cons, meanwhile, include the need to reach scale among both users and publishers. While many publishers and platforms appear keen, it also remains to be seen whether users are happy for their email address – albeit in encrypted form – to be used for ad targeting across the web, including on Disney's properties.

A gathering movement

While the cookie is not yet dead, its deprecation has led to an acceleration in deals of this kind.

Following Amazon’s announcement of a partnership to integrate Unified ID 2.0 with its Web Services unit, the addition of Disney will boost this tool's credibility at a time when a lot of industry observers imagined it would be Google taking a position of leadership.

For Disney, the deal brings greater addressability to its advertising. It also opens up access to Disney’s data clean room – the name given to protected digital environments where personally identifiable information (PII) is anonymised, processed and stored, and a big topic in ad tech circles – which it launched late last year

What they say

“The growth of our relationship with The Trade Desk is a milestone in addressability and automated buying at scale, and the latest step as we use technology to enable advertisers to buy once to deliver everywhere across Disney,” said Aaron LaBerge, president/chief technology officer, Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, in a statement.

Sourced from Disney/The Trade Desk, WARC, Amazon