Exposure ledger
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
The mechanism behind cross-channel frequency deduplication and sequential journeys, and multi-key by design because advertising identifiers are a declining asset: the spine loses precision one step at a time rather than failing at once. Two things are kept strictly separate. The ledger itself never performs an identity join, which happens only in the key-translation service where the ninety-day retention rule is enforced. And its current state — the spine is designed, schema-backed and unit-tested, and is fed only by the deterministic sandbox today. A live report proves aggregate delivery, not household exposure, so the system deliberately refuses to mint identities from one.
Goes deeper: One ledger, four keys
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Deduplication
Removing the double-counting that occurs when the same person is reached by more than one channel or placement in a campaign, so that combined reach reflects distinct people rather than the sum of each channel's separate count.
Frequency capping
Limiting how many times one person or household sees the same advert within a given period, to control wear-out and wasted impressions. It is set per campaign, per channel or — rarely — across channels, and that granularity is what decides whether the cap means anything.
Identity resolution
The process of deciding that two different identifiers refer to the same person or household, so that behaviour seen under one can be joined to the other.
Mobile advertising ID (MAID)
A resettable identifier assigned by a mobile operating system to a device, used to recognise the same device across apps for advertising. Apple's IDFA and Google's advertising ID are the two that matter.
Household graph
A dataset linking devices, identifiers and addresses believed to belong to the same household, allowing a television, a laptop and a phone in one home to be recognised as one buying unit.
More on adbuymcp's own vocabulary
Six terms we either invented or use more strictly than the category does. Defined here so nobody has to guess.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
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