Four telecom giants from across Europe are coming together to launch a new ID system for advertising. Here’s why we’re celebrating.
Every company has done it — looked across the digital pond and taken a peek at what a competitor is doing to get traction in their slice of the market. Competition comes with its own set of challenges, but it reassuringly proves there’s demand for your product or service. It gets lonely when you’re trying to make a market on your own.
That’s why we’re excited about the launch of TrustPid, a joint venture between Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, France’s Orange, Spain’s Telefónica and the UK’s Vodafone. It’s the telecom sector’s first attempt to work alongside Google, Amazon and Meta in the lucrative online advertising sector, and our first competitor in this space.
Why are we so excited?
TrustPid substantiates the vision we’ve been enthusiastically advocating since our inception — there’s a huge market opportunity for telcos to diversify their revenue streams by offering a privacy-led identification solution to support the digital marketing activities of publishers and brands. The industry has lost the battle for third-party tracking cookies, but marketers don’t want to go back to non-personalised advertising. They are crying out for a new way to know and reach their audiences because soon, they won’t be able to recognise who their users are any more.
Telco ID verification is a proven way to fill this gap in the market. But more than that, it’s an opportunity to do things better for consumers than creepy surveillance which can’t explain how someone’s data was captured, who it’s been shared with, or what’s been done with it.
So far, we’ve been out there on our own proving this opportunity. Now these savvy telco giants are entering the market – with the approval of European Commission regulators – it drives home what we’ve been saying. TrustPid should reassure telcos that they have a place to take in this ecosystem and there’s tremendous value to be realised by doing so, for all telcos globally.
Shared problems have similar solutions
Both Novatiq’s and TrustPid’s approaches to identifiers use telco networks as the data foundation. We both recognise the opportunity lies in delivering a publisher service. We agree that it’s about fuelling the digital advertising market by giving publishers and brands the ability to recognise their users so they can serve up personalised advertisements, and a platform on which to activate that consented data for themselves and for third parties. And we agree that privacy is key.
With TrustPid, the participating telcos will generate a secure, pseudonymised ID, called a TrustPid token, which identifies users of mobile operators for a 90-day period and is shared with publishers and brands for user recognition.
With Novatiq, the first-party ID, called Zenith ID, is generated by the publisher or brand and shared with the telco network for verification, to enable continued user recognition.
Interoperability is mission critical
For all ID solutions, whether telco-based, authenticated or probabilistic, the key to having a full marketplace stems from the ability to be interoperable. While each of these identifiers is useful in itself, the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
As the name suggests, interoperability gives brands and publishers the ability to use a range of different IDs in concert to achieve their objectives. So instead of choosing one model over another, they can glue all the solutions together and tap into all the innovation that’s happening in the market in a way that suits their campaign requirements.
For example, solutions based on probabilistic data are good at finding propensity cohorts outside of a brand’s established customer base who are highly likely to be interested in the brand’s services and products; it’s therefore a good asset for customer acquisition. But accuracy is a struggle. The groupings have to be large enough to not contain personally identifiable information but small enough to have value. Use them in conjunction with telco-based deterministic data, however, and you get a fully rounded solution that balances accuracy and personalisation to support customer acquisition and loyalty/ retention efforts.
Interoperability for telco-verified IDs ensures that a market-facing ID is available for buyers, regardless of whether the telco contracts directly with Novatiq or as part of the TrustPid joint venture.
What next for telcos?
The arrival of TrustPid is a sign of the times, but it also drives home what we at Novatiq have been saying for a long time — that telcos truly do hold the keys to unlocking the full potential of the digital advertising market.
So far, there’s been no announcement of a potential launch time frame for TrustPid. But telcos that are looking to deliver new IDs to the digital advertising market don’t have to wait to add this lucrative new service layer — they can partner with us today. Our extended solution is already live in key markets and we can deliver it very quickly. And of course, we will continue to work with all telcos, including those participating in the JV, on their data monetisation strategies.
We’ll be watching with interest as the JV goes through the process they need to launch in the specified markets. In the meantime, we’re ready to help telcos take their first steps on the ID-provision journey. To find out more, get in touch with us today.