PETs, TEEs, now ADMaP. Adtech and its acronyms, man.
The IAB Tech Lab launched the Attribution Data Matching Protocol (ADMaP) yesterday, now open for public comment until November 14, 2024. ADMaP is billed as a privacy-first standard that allows advertisers and publishers to measure campaign performance and conversions without exposing user data. Put simply, ADMaP helps companies understand how their ads perform while keeping user information private.
ADMap meets the growing demand for privacy-focused ad solutions as the industry moves away from trad identifiers like cookies. Instead, ADMaP uses advanced Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), like Private Set Intersection (PSI), which allows two parties to compare data without revealing any sensitive details, and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which ensure data is processed securely in an isolated environment.
Companies that helped develop ADMaP (through the IAB Tech Lab’s Rearc Addressability Working Group), include AppsFlyer, Magnite, Decentriq, Dstillery, and InfoSum. After the public comment period, ADMaP could become an industry-wide standard.
Why This Matters:
With more privacy regulations coming and the impending loss of third-party cookies (even if Google delayed it and pushed more of the responsibility on to consumers), advertisers and publishers are facing a big challenge: how do you measure campaign success while maintaining user privacy—and how do you do it collaboratively?
ADMaP tries to offer a privacy-first alternative to legacy attribution (often powered by cookies and deprecating data) by enabling secure data exchange between parties. It addresses concerns about data security while making sure advertisers can still measure ad effectiveness.
The protocol sets clear privacy and security goals, such as protecting users’ PII and preventing either party—advertisers or publishers—from learning more about the other’s users than necessary for attribution (ADMaP uses hashing to protect data). The IAB also designed the protocol to integrate with data clean rooms, which are increasingly the norm (87% of B2C marketers said they use a data clean room today).
While the language may remind us (and by us, I mean me) of PAIR, the two protocols serve very different purposes. PAIR focuses on audience matching before the campaign, while ADMaP is all about measuring performance and attribution after the campaign. (I think, correct me if wrong.)
Experts React:
Alexandre Nderagakura, adtech, programmatic, data, and privacy expert, and former Tech Director of IAB Europe, tweeted about the ADMaP announcement: “To take into consideration: – Cost : Need to assess the cost, participants, partnerships… – User consent : How a pub or adv can justify user consent for an email? Add a source? What happens if a user decides to say no? Automatic or manual change? On daily or weekly basis?”
Nderagakura might be raising concerns about the practical challenges of implementing ADMaP, like the financial costs of participation, as well as how advertisers and publishers will manage user consent (and on what cadence).
Our Take:
Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, called ADMaP a potential “game changer” for how the industry handles attribution, offering more privacy and transparency. While privacy concerns usually focus on targeting, ADMaP tackles the less-talked-about area of conversion measurement. This is good!
As digital advertising faces signal loss from tighter privacy regulations and the phase-out of third-party cookies, ADMaP seems to offer a framework that balances privacy with the need for publishers and advertisers to track campaign performance effectively. It feels like we’ve seen a lot of announcements like this recently, which is important as regulators seem to be circling the industry, eyeing privacy as an opportunity to install more rules of the road.
