Publisher and agency executives scrutinize email-based universal IDs as the third-party cookie’s long-term heir apparent

Email-based universal IDs’ potential signal-to-noise ratio does not appear to be the biggest potential pitfall, however. Privacy concerns are a much larger red flag.

“That’s far more invasive than a random cookie ID. The fact that my email underpins this privacy envelope that is then passed around, that’s the scary part,” said Brett Goverman, associate vp of data strategy at Penske Media Group, in a recent interview.

Another publishing executive was similarly unsure of email-based IDs’ potential to pass muster in an era where people are becoming more aware of how they can be tracked online. “Given all the privacy concerns nowadays, if you were to outright be very, very clear [to a person visiting] a site that, by giving your email address, we’re going to take that and pool data from other people and change the advertising you’re showing, from a public attitude perspective, people aren’t going to want that,” this executive said.

People are one concern, but government regulators may be the foremost issue. The Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the U.K., in particular, appear poised to ramp up their privacy enforcement practices. Meanwhile, the newly appointed lead of California’s privacy enforcement agency, Ashkan Soltani, has described email-based IDs as being “more invasive than even cookies,” which could foreshadow rules he may implement around the use of email addresses for identifying people across different sites and apps.

“As soon as privacy regulators figure out that [the digital ad industry is] using an email as the underpin of this entire thing, it’s going to get even harder to use that as the currency between platforms,” Goverman said.

The concerns around email-based IDs is leaving publisher and agency executives seeking out alternatives to this alternative, such as relying on contextual targeting and limiting personalized targeting to individual publishers’ sites and the first-party data those publishers have collected from their audiences. Then again, if advertisers flock to adopting email-based IDs for their ad buys, publishers may find themselves forced to follow suit despite the unease.

“The thing that’s ultimately going to, at least in the short term, push the adoption [of email-based IDs] is advertisers that come in and want these solutions,” said the publishing executive. Some advertisers have already asked their company to add support for LiveRamp’s alternate ID RampID. If advertisers were to reach the point of issuing an ultimatum that the publisher support email-based IDs, the publisher would be pressed to support them despite the concerns. That potential is, in turn, pressing them and others to look to prop up potential alternatives.

“It’s understandable why [advertisers] want to use these [email-based IDs] because there are specific people that they want to be able to target. On our side, we’re going to have to be responsible for coming up with an offering that’s as good or better than what the universal ID providers are proposing,” said the publishing executive.

This article has been updated to reflect that LiveRamp’s ID is called RampID. A previous version referred to it as Authenticated Traffic Solution, which is a separate LiveRamp product.