Mobile advertising ID (MAID)
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
A declining asset. Platform changes have reduced availability sharply and the direction is one way, which is why any measurement spine built on advertising identifiers alone degrades on a schedule somebody else controls. AdBuyMCP holds hashed advertising identifiers for at most ninety days, after which the hash is persistently stripped from the exposure event, re-grading it to a coarser key rather than deleting the record. That rule lives in the key-translation service, which is the only module we have that performs identity joins at all.
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.
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.
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.
European Unified ID (EUID)
A consent-based identifier for European advertising, derived from a hashed email or phone number provided with consent, designed to let first-party audiences be addressed across publishers without third-party cookies.
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2)
An open-source, consent-based advertising identifier derived from a hashed email or phone number, developed as an industry alternative to third-party cookies. EUID is its European counterpart.
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