ID5 at scale in Europe, rolling out its shared ID infrastructure globally in 2019

  • Posted by Valbona Gjini
  • On Nov 29, 2018

ID matching specialist now reaching over 1 billion devices per month and synchronising advertising IDs across more than 35 Ad Tech platforms.

London, November 29, 2018 – Just over one year after its launch, ID matching specialist ID5 announces that it now reaches 1 billion devices per month in Europe and provides matching capabilities with more than 35 Ad Tech platforms.

Created in September 2017, ID5 has built a shared identity solution for Ad Tech and publishers to solve the problems created by cookie matching. After raising 1M€ in a seed round led by 360 Capital Partners in March 2018, ID5 built a team of 9, recruiting advertising technology experts from AppNexus, Rubicon Project, Sizmek and Oracle Data Cloud. Thanks to its neutral and specialised service focused on reducing the number of synchronisation pixels and improving match rates, ID5 has gained rapid traction with leading Ad Tech companies. The ID5 graph currently includes users IDs from more than 35 platforms including Adform, AppNexus, Avocet, Bidswitch, Dailymotion, Eyeota, Improve Digital, Platform161, Purch (now part of Future Publishing), Semasio, ShareThis,  Smart, Tapad and Weborama. The company also enjoys strong support from multiple European publishers, which leverage the ID5 services to improve user experience, reduce risks of data leakage, and facilitate GDPR compliance.

Reaching one billion devices in Europe is a major milestone for us”, says Mathieu Roche, CEO and co-founder of ID5. “In the year of GDPR and as Google and Facebook keep increasing their dominance of digital advertising, premium publishers and independent Ad Tech platforms recognise the need for the industry to rely on a more efficient and more transparent user identification infrastructure. ID5 is building a neutral and shared ID solution designed to limit the number of synchronisation pixels fired on publisher pages, and to increase monetisation capabilities and match rates between platforms. The response of the market has been very positive and has allowed us to scale very quickly to a point where we can deliver significant revenue improvement across most European markets.”

ID5 improves match rates and reduces wastage due to poor matching of user IDs, which benefits all participants in the programmatic ecosystem:

SSPs can leverage ID5’s solutions to increase their match rates with DSPs and DMPs and maximise the availability of their most valuable inventory. Publisher technology provider Purch leverages ID5’s service to improve its match rate with AppNexus. Over the summer, Purch saw a 30% reduction in the number of unmatched impressions. Matched impressions deliver CPMs three to four times higher than unmatched impressions, resulting in a 10% increase in revenue from AppNexus in France and the UK, where the service was initially deployed.

Purch is not the only technology provider to explore ways to improve programmatic efficiencies. “User identification is key to our promise to connect brands with their audiences” says Arnaud Créput, Chief Executive Officer, Smart. “As an industry, we need to improve our capabilities in this area if we want to enable premium publishers to build their own private gardens as a way to work around the challenges posed by the walled gardens.  ID5 has come up with a strong solution aligning the interests of all stakeholders. We are committed to supporting their efforts in building a shared identification infrastructure that we can all leverage to make programmatic work better.

This statement is echoed by Nola Solomon, Vice President, Global Programmatic & Strategic Partnerships at Dailymotion: “As a leading video-sharing technology platform, Dailymotion relies heavily on programmatic advertising to monetize its audiences globally. Shared IDs are critical to the continued growth of programmatic and we are in support of solutions that solve the issues related to user identification and cookie matching.”

ID5’s solution also enables DSPs to connect seamlessly to data and inventory providers and to improve match rates with premium supply partners. Platform161, a leading European DSP, experienced a 65% increase in number of bids on AppNexus inventory by leveraging ID5’s matching capabilities.

“We decided to work with ID5 because we think the industry needs a solution that improves the cookie matching process” says Marco Kloots, CEO at Platform161. “By migrating to their service, we have dramatically increased our ability to buy from AppNexus, which leads to better campaign delivery and better fulfilment of our trading agreements with publishers.”

For Jochen Schlosser, Chief Strategy Officer at Adform, “identifying users in a scalable, efficient and privacy compliant way is a key challenge for Ad Tech. We believe that there is value in a neutral party like ID5 building an independent user identification infrastructure, especially if it improves the way our clients can engage with their audiences via programmatic channels.”

Finally, DMPs and data providers can benefit from better match rates with each other and into DSPs, which results in a higher proportion of data targetable for clients. Thanks to ID5, data providers and DMP users can forecast the size of audience segments available to buyers so that they can define appropriate pricing structure and manage expectations. ID5 has measured an improvement of 50 to 100% in match rates between data providers and Ad Tech platforms, significantly increasing the ability to monetise data via programmatic channels.

“As one of the leading audience technology platforms, Eyeota is a critical partner of data providers and brands who want to engage with qualified audiences”, says Pieter de Zwart, CTO for Eyeota. “Too often, programmatic fails to deliver on that promise because of technical integration issues. ID5 provides an interesting solution to this issue so that we can focus on maximizing the ability for our clients to access their target audiences via our platform.”

For Frédéric Grelier, Chief Data Officer at Weborama, “cookie matching currently limits brands’ ability to engage with their audiences online. We need to find a way to lift these barriers and to leverage a truly scalable identification infrastructure. ID5 offers a solution to this problem and we’re looking forward to leveraging their service as they build up globally.”We have reached critical mass in Europe, and remain committed to helping more European publishers and Ad Tech platforms identify users efficiently”, comments Mathieu Roche. “We also want to capitalise on our success and on the current momentum surrounding identity to start to deploy our services globally. We already have customers who have significant activity in North America, LATAM and APAC so we will roll-out our infrastructure in those regions in 2019.  We believe that we can reach 10B devices per month by the end of 2019, providing the ad tech industry with a scalable, neutral, efficient way to identify users globally.

We have reached critical mass in Europe, and remain committed to helping more European publishers and Ad Tech platforms identify users efficiently”, comments Mathieu Roche. “We also want to capitalise on our success and on the current momentum surrounding identity to start to deploy our services globally. We already have customers who have significant activity in North America, LATAM and APAC so we will roll-out our infrastructure in those regions in 2019.  We believe that we can reach 10B devices per month by the end of 2019, providing the ad tech industry with a scalable, neutral, efficient way to identify users globally.