As advertisers have cut down on how many demand-side platforms (DSPs) they work with, publishers have increased the number of their supply-side platform (SSP) partners. Lauren T. Fisher, executive vice president of business intelligence at research firm Advertiser Perceptions, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss the company's latest wave of SSP research, why identity resolution is important, and what to expect now that cookie deprecation in Chrome has been delayed.

Identity resolution. Today’s customers expect to be known and treated as individuals. It’s critically important to be able to resolve any confusion about customer identity. Confusion can arise for a variety of reasons, including data being entered inconsistently in legacy systems or incompletely in forms and other online identity capture applications.

Too many hurdles stand in the way of a unified standard for linear and CTV ad measurement, including correlating buys across fragmented platforms, making sense of disparate data sources, and achieving identity resolution. Private companies, industry associations, and coalitions of stakeholders are working hard to solve these problems, but don’t expect a solution in 2022. Read Next. Sources. Adweek.

David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) joins eMarketer co-founder and Insider Intelligence chief evangelist Geoff Ramsey to discuss how digital advertising is adapting to changing times, including the growth of the connected TV ecosystem, developments in privacy regulation, the quest for marketing attribution, and the need for identity resolution in a post-cookie world.

That means agencies should assume they will be working with more identifiers, more identity resolution providers, and more targeting options going forward than any individual advertiser would be. Interoperability is going to be critical for organizations that need the ability to work with many partners. Publishers Are at the Forefront.

Neustar's Devon DeBlasio says that as brands step back and reevaluate marketing strategies during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond, they should also rethink the way they communicate consumer privacy and identity, given advancements in identity resolution.

Achieving identity resolution—i.e., reconciling all device identifiers associated with a consumer—across digital and linear environments. The Trade Desk recently opened its Unified ID 2.0 standard, which PR Week described as “an identity framework that enables the same cross-site targeting and attribution as third-party cookies but with stricter processes and controls.”

Several pointed to the amount of collaboration going on among independent players in the industry to innovate new solutions for identity resolution, targeting, and measurement.

Marketers see third-party cookie deprecation as a near-term challenge, but this change also presents an opportunity to prioritize identity management strategies and quality data.

While the walled gardens will thrive in a cookie-less world, the open web, including many prominent B2B publishers, is innovating now to solve for identity resolution and hopefully before cookie fidelity makes its final exit.