Lawful-basis manifest
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
It exists so the answer to 'where did this audience come from?' is a document a data protection officer can read rather than a conversation, and so that the record a reviewer sees is the same record the compiler acted on. Its limits should be stated as plainly as its purpose: it attaches conditions you still owe, such as requiring an assessment on file or verifying a vendor attestation on connection. It tells you what remains to be done. It is not a compliance certificate and turning its conditions into enforced launch gates is work we have not finished.
Goes deeper: Lawful basis as an artefact
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.
Lawful basis
The legal ground relied on to process personal data, of which six exist under UK GDPR and at least one must be identified before processing begins. In advertising the two that matter are consent and legitimate interests, and the basis has to be settled before the processing, not after.
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.
Persona compiler
The deterministic stage that turns one described audience into each channel's native targeting specification — segment identifiers, attribute combinations, show allowlists, venue packs, keyword seeds — together with a fidelity score and a lawful-basis manifest.
TCF consent string
A standardised, encoded record of what a user consented to, produced at the point of collection and readable by every participant downstream. It is passed along the advertising supply chain so that each participant can check whether it has a basis to process that person's data before it does.
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.
Talk it through