2016 Edition: A Marketer’s Guide To Cross-Device Identity
Summary
There is also a growing trend around data companies like Oracle adopting a blended approach in certain cases, using a combination of probabilistic to complement their deterministic matching capabilities in an attempt to reach the scale of players like Facebook and Google. In November, right before the FTC’s cross-device workshop, an article in ProPublica called attention to the fact that smart TV maker Vizio had updated its privacy policy to say it had begun collecting and sharing cross-device user data with advertisers. A few days after that, a piece in Ars Technica decried a practice known as audio beaconing, which takes advantage of inaudible, high-frequency sounds embedded in ads to track user behavior across devices, including TVs, phones and tablets. “We fully understand the important part that innovation plays … [but] if you’re looking at your TV kind of side-eyed and worry about what’s going on there, that could turn into a dangerous spiral,” the FTC’s Brookman observed at an International Association of Privacy Professionals event in November. Tyler Pietz, a VP and programmatic strategist at IPG trading desk Cadreon, explained it like this: “For the purposes of a study, it’s pretty easy to focus on the stats that position you in the best possible light – but you can’t provide a 10% match rate for an advertiser.