Whitewashing bad behavior

The IAB Tech Lab’s standards make it easier for publishers and supply-side platforms to declare which method they’re using to identify users as the number of identifiers proliferates. It stops short of declaring which method is best.

“It’s about disclosure,” Katsur said.

This is frustrating for some on the buy side who see all ID bridging as fraud and want to clamp down on publishers sending bridged IDs.

“It’s sort of whitewashing the behavior,” said a DSP adtech source who didn’t want to be identified because of sensitive industry relations. “I don’t like that it seems like people are being rewarded for their fraudulent behavior by getting an extension to the spec.”

This source intends to ignore EID bids with apparent ID bridging.

At stake for publishers is a real loss of revenue. ID bridging makes “substantially” more inventory available to publishers because it allows greater monetization of previously non-addressable environments, like Safari, said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at publisher network Raptive.

Even DSPs not ideologically against ID bridging still use algorithms that generally prefer to bid on cookies, putting bid requests with different identifiers at a disadvantage. That dynamic is what incentivized publishers to place ID bridges in the buyeruid field in the first place.

“Would my company’s life be a little bit easier if the buyeruid [field] could keep having bridged IDs?” Bannister asked rhetorically. “But I understand the perspective of the buy side. It will create more work for the sell side, but it is in the interest of the larger ecosystem.”

Implementation remains a question

IAB specs like this one are only rules on paper. They only really affect the ecosystem if adtech companies enforce them. Lagging enforcement and adoption have long hampered other standards like those on online video.

It remains to be seen if DSPs interpret these standards by checking that the fields are labeled correctly, ignoring EID fields with ID bridging present and only bidding on requests via the buyeruid field, where cookies are present.

Plus, while the delineation between the buyeruid and EID fields is now clearer, this breakdown may no longer matter once cookies are deprecated.

Katsur said that if in the years after cookies are deprecated, the industry stops using the buyeruid spec, the tech lab would consider new standards.