Simplifying the IAB's Cross-Device Targeting Guidelines

Since the success of MediaMath and the acceptance among marketers to favour depth marketing instead of width, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has been working hard to produce an industry approved document with cross-device targeting guidelines. Having gone through them, they are a clear set of instructions that will marketers in the Middle East prevent ad waste that often comes in the form of multiple impressions being wasted across devices.

To identify hardware, the digital advertising industry currently relies on the Universal Device Identifier (UDID) and the Media Access Control (MAC) Address. To identify unique ID's via software, the digital advertising industry currently relies on either the Google Android Advertising ID (AAID), the Apple iOS Advertising ID (IDFA) and the Microsoft Mobile OS Advertising ID.

The guideline addresses the needs of a range of marketing activities, from mobile targeting for footfall generation to cross-screen engagement for group activations. It also covers the tactics to improve ad targeting, track attribution, gather empirical measurement and achieve campaign relevancy.

The targeting guidelines are by no means new and recognise that a host of methodologies has existed in the past for anonymised matching and mapping of users and their devices. The guidelines recognise that across mobile devices, the mobile web, and in-app environment, identification becomes less reliable as tracking pixels and cookies vary.

So marketers are expected to consume the contents of the targeting guidelines while being ready to apply a mixed bag of tracking methods. In our new reality, prospects across income ranges have up to four devices operating at once.

The report concludes by urging marketers to invest in driving personalised messages, develop profiles based on browsing and purchasing behaviour, and most importantly - respect the privacy of the prospect at all given points in time.

Every marketer that wants to engage at this level must understand the basics of device graphs, device recognition, deferred deep linking, and frequency capping.