One of the most challenging parts of marketing in today’s modern world is the complex and differing set of rules surrounding consumer data protection and consumer privacy. Every major corporation in America now has privacy officers and a web of privacy rules that make almost any form of marketing a challenge. While all this advertising exchange technology was exploding, consumer data privacy laws were tightening globally. California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the European Union’s GDPR are two of the most notable laws that were being developed in parallel with all this new advertising technology. So, there was a real need to create a privacy compliant data solution that would allow for the delivery of all this technological capability in a privacy compliant way. To work properly, the data crosswalk (noted earlier) and personal targeting solutions needed to stay away from sensitive information like requiring the need to hand over things like Social Security Numbers and other personally protected identifiable information on individuals that could be used to hack or harm consumers. The solution that has won the day is the concept of a specific use case “Persistent Identifier” (PID) or “Unified Identifier” (UID).

 

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Powerful data aggregation companies have built massive databases that continually identify and connect all the devices and email addresses (both personal and work) that a person uses. The goal is to create a single identifiable record of all the ways to reach a person – a crosswalk to the addresses of all their devices and digital addresses. While these companies gather and use this information, they DO NOT give this information to advertisers. Additionally, they DO NOT keep any other targeting information on any individuals. Think of all this as an extended White Page phone listing. These aggregators maintain one simple but important part of the connection puzzle, without storing any sensitive information about a person – no likes or purchasing history, no credit card information or social security numbers. etc. The IP addresses of devices and email addresses are things readily shared or easily gathered when people connect to other people or content sites.

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So, what does an advertiser get when they want to target a group of people using their known digital devices? They get a list of in-house created persistent identifier numbers. These numbers mean nothing to the advertiser or the data contributor. They only make sense to the data aggregator you are using for this purpose. The purpose for the database is to simply be the connected crosswalk between the advertiser and publications (placing the advertisement).

 

Because the advertisers never actually get access to the records they are targeting, there is no privacy risk of using that information beyond its intended purpose of ad placement. Additionally, each data contributor to the crosswalk (like MCH) gets to keep private (for our use only) all the information that we collect and consider proprietary information. In our case, that would be things like a particular person is a known and verified educator that teaches at a particular school and has a particular job function and any number of other important aspects that we compile. By connecting the MCH data to the aggregator, what we get is the ability to reach each of our educator contacts on all the different devices and addresses that they use.