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- No Cookies, No Problem: The Industry’s Favorite (and Least Hated) Identity Solutions
No Cookies, No Problem: The Industry’s Favorite (and Least Hated) Identity Solutions
Pesach Lattin (ADOTAT)
February 04, 2025
In partnership with
Here’s the deal: We’ve been talking about cookieless tracking for so long that it feels like we’re all just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
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So we asked around—what does the industry actually think about the solutions out there? Not just the press release fluff, but the real, brutal opinions. And, oh boy, did we get some.
The Big Takeaway: No One Knows What They’re Doing (Yet)
If you were hoping for a clear-cut answer to post-cookie tracking, grab a seat and some popcorn—because the industry is still throwing spaghetti at the wall. The harsh reality? No single solution works on its own. Every platform, every vendor, every so-called "silver bullet" has gaps big enough to drive a programmatic ad fraud scheme through.
Craig Golaszewski put it bluntly: "No single one is a solution." And he’s got the numbers to back it up:
UID2.0? Covers about 5% of his exchange.
LiveRamp? A stronger 30% coverage.
ID5? Leading with 40%, but still far from universal.
The result? A Frankenstein’s monster of identity solutions, stitched together with duct tape and good intentions, where advertisers are forced to juggle multiple IDs just to get a fraction of the addressability they had before.
David Nyurenberg didn’t mince words either: "You need to add ‘None of the Above’ to your survey." That about sums up the mood in the trenches—skepticism, frustration, and a whole lot of eye-rolling at vendors promising one-stop solutions that don’t actually exist.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: interoperability is a nightmare. Most of these IDs aren’t talking to each other in any meaningful way, leaving advertisers stuck managing yet another layer of complexity. “You think you’re making progress, and then you realize you’re just shifting from one broken system to another,” one exec told me off the record.
So where does that leave us?
Some are hedging their bets, layering multiple ID solutions and hoping for the best.
Others are doubling down on first-party data, praying it’s enough.
And a growing number of folks are just waiting to see which solution becomes dominant, because no one wants to bet on the wrong horse.
At the end of the day, the post-cookie world is still a giant game of ‘figure it out as you go.’ The only thing the industry agrees on? It’s a mess, and no one has a clear path forward.
The Illusion of a Unified Identity
Aziz Rahimtoola isn’t just critiquing the industry’s obsession with alternative IDs—he’s calling out a fundamental delusion. The belief that UID2 or RampID, or any other alphabet-soup solution, will ever achieve universal adoption is the kind of wishful thinking that keeps the ad tech industrial complex spinning.
The problem isn’t the technology; it’s the nature of the players involved.
In a world of walled gardens, where control over data is the currency of dominance, expecting Meta, Google, Amazon—or any of the other giants—to play nice with a common identifier is like asking rival kings to share a throne. The business model doesn’t allow for it. Each of these companies has built its empire on hoarding data, not distributing it. Meanwhile, outside the castle walls, companies like Sabio are charting their own course, relying on proprietary household graphs that don’t depend on industry-wide consensus.
Rahimtoola’s point is a simple one, but it cuts through the noise: unless the industry aligns on one standard ID—a Herculean task in an ecosystem designed around competitive advantage—there will be no true solution. The alternative IDs flooding the market aren’t bridging gaps; they’re just creating new fault lines. The Trade Desk and LiveRamp can evangelize all they want, but ad tech isn’t a democracy, and adoption doesn’t come from good intentions—it comes from power. And right now, power is held by those who don’t need an alternative.
