Do you remember the early days of the internet? Each web-page was a unique experience. Even when you fired up well-known sites like Friendster or Myspace, you were still never quite sure what you were going to get.
What about the ads? The ads kind of sucked.
Over time, the industry learned. We got these wonderful things called cookies — little snippets of code in your browser that let sites know what you’ve bought before, and what kind of ads you might be more receptive to.
Unfortunately, the technology is still not perfect:
- Amazon thinks I’m trying to start the world’s largest frying pan collection.
- YouTube is very excited to help out with my new career as a Russian ballerina, and;
- The Scientologists got very excited after I Googled Tom Cruise.
The problem the industry faces is that web pages only receive an extremely myopic viewpoint on the target individual. There are a lot of really complicated algorithms working hard to serve me ads I’d like to see, but without a more nuanced data set, they’re worthless.
Enter the Advertiser ID.
Mobile Advertiser ID (Ad ID or MAID) is essentially the smartphone version of the browser cookie. Each Ad ID is tied to your operating system instead of your browser, making it far more valuable. This link means that my Ad ID has access to everything: what shows I watch, my favorite locations, even the music I like. But Ad ID isn’t just handing all that information over to advertisers. Ad ID works with the app or web algorithm to pick and choose the ads I’d like to see, from its catalog.
At mobilads, we work with Ad-ID to track the impressions our cars make on pedestrians. Thanks to the Ad ID’s we collect, we can help serve relevant ads to our target demographics.
