In this year’s US upfront ad sales season, ad buyers are pushing content owners to be able to give them automation and to limit the frequency with which viewers are exposed to their ads across different screen types.

With that challenge, it may seem like the ongoing limits being placed on digital user identifiers would hamper the process.

But, piece by piece, companies are giving publishers, broadcast owners and buyers new tools that, in many ways, are better than traditional targeting tech.

Better than cookies?

The Trade Desk kickstarted Unified ID 2.0, a post-cookie solution for making identity buyable by using hashed and encrypted email addresses.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, JoAnna Foyle, SVP for inventory partnerships at one such firm, The Trade Desk, says the mission is to build an effective, consumer-safe identity system.

“We think, frankly, it provides advertisers and publishers with a better option than cookies ever offered,” Foyle says.

“It really is an opportunity to rise all boats for the open internet.”

Paprtnership approach

Elaborating on that idea, Foyle says: “For those of us companies who philosophically believe in an open internet, this is a way for us to band together and continue to offer targeting for publishers and for advertisers at scale in a world where cookies are no longer the option.

“What we talk to our buyers and our publishers about a ton is the notion of interoperability. We don’t all have to use the exact same solution, but our solutions have to talk to each other because that’s the only way we come up with a solution for cookies, at scale, across the open internet.”

To that end, recent months have seen the announcements that UID 2.0 will be integrated by the likes of Epsilon’s CORE ID, OpenAP and Blockgraph.

And UID 2.0 just began its first ever deployment in Asia-Pacific, in Taiwan.

Cap the frequency

For The Trade Desk’s Foyle, it’s all about balancing advertiser and publisher interests plus a good consumer experience.

She says, too often, the inability of different channel screens to stitch together a single customer identity leads to excessive frequency of ad exposure, and she urges companies to use new tools available to overcome the problem.

Meanwhile, UK TV media sales house Sky Media in May announced it would tap The Trade Desk to make its VOD ad inventory available to buy programmatically.

That inventory exists in the VOD services not only of Comcast-owned Sky, Europe’s large satellite TV provider, but also of the broadcasters whose ads it represents, including Channel 4.

You are watching “Convergent TV: Driving Addressability Across Traditional and Connected TV,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Beachfront. For more videos, please visit this page.