Identity resolution
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
The highest-risk operation in advertising data and the one worth isolating architecturally. In AdBuyMCP exactly one module performs identity joins — the key-translation service — and the exposure ledger every channel writes into never resolves a key back to a person or across key spaces. That boundary is why the ninety-day retention rule has one place to be enforced and one place to be audited.
Goes deeper: The identity boundary
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.
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.
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.
Exposure ledger
A single record of advertising exposures across every channel, keyed on whichever of four identifiers a channel can supply — an opaque household key, a hashed advertising id, a consent-based id, or a postcode sector — with per-key legal grading.
UK GDPR
The United Kingdom's data protection regime, retaining the structure of the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Requires a lawful basis for processing personal data and gives individuals rights over data about them.
More on targeting and identity
How an audience is described to a seller, and how much of the description survives. Most of the honest difficulty in media buying lives here.
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.
Talk it through