Household ID
Flashtalking’s clients (advertisers and their agencies) have an important business need to understand the effectiveness of their online marketing campaign activity. Due to recently reduced viability (and pending loss) of 3rd-party cookies in the web ecosystem, and increasing media activity from devices/environments (eg. CTVs, iOS) for which neither cookies nor other current means for identifying devices for campaign analytics is viable, Flashtalking has developed an alternative means for marketing campaign measurement and analytics.
The new solution, called Household ID (HH ID), leverages proprietary, probabilistic AI modeling to attribute impressions and conversions to such unidentifiable devices based on IP addresses and additional non-personal information automatically (passively) collected by the Ad Server as part of standard information passed through HTTP web transactions. Flashtalking uses this HH ID technique when other direct methods (cookie and non-cookie device recognition with Consent) are not feasible. With this technology, Flashtalking can cluster certain devices into a grouping (ie. “household”) for campaign measurement and analytics purposes, though such groupings cannot definitively determine whether the related devices are controlled by any identifiable individual.
As the methodology specifically only uses data provided with standard Internet/HTTP web activity, and cannot be used to definitively and deterministically-identify an individual or their device, Flashtalking has assessed and documented a Legitimate Interest legal basis for using the HH ID methodology in the EU as a particularly ethical and consumer-friendly/safe approach to help measure marketing campaign performance.