About a week ago, the IAB Tech Lab introduced the PAIR (Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation) protocol. PAIR gives advertisers and publishers a privacy-centered way to match and activate first-party data for campaigns without third-party cookies.
Google developed PAIR in 2022 and later open-sourced it by donating it to the IAB Tech Lab earlier this year, allowing it to be used industry-wide. This new protocol is the result of that, with the IAB Tech Lab expanding PAIR to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to work together. The protocol allows for better communication between different data clean rooms and lets all DSPs use it.
The public can review and comment on the PAIR protocol until October 25, 2024.
Why This Matters:
Google recently introduced “confidential matching,” a secure method for linking advertisers’ first-party data with measurement and audience solutions. This approach uses confidential computing, which protects data throughout its lifecycle using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) – specialized software and hardware.
This announcement raised some questions about how confidential matching differs from PAIR. The confusion is understandable, given the sheer acronym-ness of it all, from TEEs to PETs (Privacy Enhancing Technologies).
Experts React:
With that in mind, we asked Vince Niou, the Founder of APAC-based marketing agency Skeleton Key, to help explain PAIR versus confidential matching and provide his take on the IAB PAIR protocol.
Regardless of where you might be located, Vince and Skeleton Key regularly publish great explainers on data and identity topics (see here and here), so having him speak to this was a no-brainer. Here’s our conversation.
Explain how you see PAIR vs. confidential matching. Why is there a need for multiple tools?
“While both facilitate data collaboration—PAIR between advertisers and publishers, and Confidential Matching between advertisers and Google—the underlying technology used is different.
PAIR is a data clean room-based protocol that relies on encryption techniques to facilitate matching between encrypted datasets without revealing the underlying PII. Clean rooms are software-based environments, meaning that PAIR relies on software-based encryption. Confidential Matching relies on TEEs (trusted execution environments) to facilitate data matching.
In contrast to clean rooms, TEEs are hardware-based secure environments in specialized processors. The fact that the data is not only encrypted but also protected on a hardware level provides greater relative security compared to a clean-room-based protocol (encryption running on software). There’s a need for both because each has its own pros and cons, making each more suited for certain use cases.”
What’s your take on the IAB PAIR announcement? What does it mean? Why does it matter?
“I think it’s great. On the industry level, it represents an evolution of how audience targeting will work in the new privacy-by-design paradigm. The IAB Tech Lab taking over the development of the standard should not only increase industry adoption but also represents how first-party data-based collaboration use cases should continue to decrease.
For advertisers, a single interoperable standard will allow them to more easily address their known users across more publisher properties. For publishers with enough visitor scale, this provides another path to monetize their visitor data. This falls under the larger umbrella of first-party data collaboration, providing a fresh revenue stream for publishers moving forward.
On a more macro-level, I think we’re in the early stages of “traditional” adtech use cases being recalibrated to function in a more privacy-safe way with PETs as the underlying tech. PAIR is an example of this. Eventually, I think these types of features and protocols are mostly going to work in the background, with the complexity abstracted away from the front end (like how it is with Confidential Matching).
In short, the tech behind PAIR is more suited for interoperability and, as a result, ideal for what it’s meant to be (especially the IAB Tech Lab’s version). Confidential Matching’s tech, on the other hand, provides greater absolute security, which is suitable for its use case as it’s only working within Google’s ecosystem, and Google has the hardware infrastructure and resources to support its scalability.”
Our Take:
Vince also provided a list of pros and cons comparing PAIR and confidential matching, which we summarized with the following (hopefully clear) chart:
Obviously, the ad industry is working to develop more advanced technologies to balance addressability with user privacy. Confidential matching, PAIR, data clean rooms, and data collaboration are all part of this trend, with the PAIR protocol another step forward.
