A Publisher Didn’t Get Its UID2 Setup Right. The Trade Desk Didn’t Notice.

Publishers that want access to programmatic CTV demand are under immense pressure to include alternative IDs like The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 in their bid requests.

The idea is that these alt IDs enable omnichannel ad targeting, leading buyers to prioritize bid requests that include them.

But who’s checking to see whether the data that publishers pass in alt ID fields is accurate and obtained with consent? And is anyone preventing shady publishers from passing junk IDs to drum up demand for their inventory?

When it comes to UID2, the buck stops with The Trade Desk, which serves as the sole administrator for the UID2 protocol. But, as it turns out, TTD’s oversight of the data underlying UID2s is less stringent in practice than some industry experts thought.

A source at a major national CTV publisher, who requested anonymity to speak freely, recently contacted AdExchanger with concerns that errors in their own UID2 setup were never caught by TTD.