IAB Tech Lab releases Seller Defined Audiences

The SDA specification allows publishers, DMPs and data providers to scale first-party data responsibly and reliably without data leakage or reliance on deprecated IDs and/or new, untested technologies. It aims to: 

1. Democratise the concept of audience cohorts for the open ecosystem
2. Provide a conceptual foundation and technical scaffolding to do so
3. Support ongoing innovation, growth, and open-market competition on top of a shared, flexible framework. SDA leverages Prebid infrastructure – the open source header bidding solution – which provides out-of-the-box scale and speed to market across Prebid’s install base

As Benjamin Dick, Senior Director of Product – Consumer Privacy, Identity and Data at IAB Tech Lab, explains: “The basic concept is straightforward. Publishers or their data partners determine audience attributes based on user interactions on their properties, map similar groups of users to broad, standardised taxonomy attribute descriptions (Audience Taxonomy), document audience characteristics/metadata via a standardised transparency schema (the Data Transparency Standard aka DTS), then relay taxonomy IDs within OpenRTB to inform downstream signaling by buyers.” 

SDA is the only addressability system design that focuses exclusively on empowering individual publishers to develop and scale anonymised first party data sets – across browser, app, and OTT/CTV environments – instead of relying on external systems that aggregate and normalise audience data points across publisher domains.

Buyers also benefit from SDA in a number of ways. Notably, SDA streamlines PMP-like implementations by removing the need for manual deal-ID creation. It can also more efficiently train DSP machine learning systems – via the rich set of DTS metadata available via API – to learn over time which cohorts generate the best marketing outcomes and optimise and reward publishers accordingly. 

Find out more about SDA and how it works via IAB Tech Lab.