Join Our Industry Mapping of ID and ID-Less Solutions

An industry initiative from IAB Europe's Addressability & Measurement Working Group

The advertising ecosystem is in the middle of a structural shift. Signal loss, evolving regulation, and new technical constraints have pushed the industry to rethink how addressability, activation, measurement, and optimization actually work in a privacy-first world. At the same time, the number of available solutions (both ID and ID-less) has grown rapidly, often faster than shared understanding.

Within the Addressability & Measurement Working Group (AMWG), we are tackling this problem by building a comprehensive Solution Mapping, a practical landscape that maps products and companies to concrete addressability and measurement use cases across the advertising lifecycle.

What We Are Building

The AMWG Solution Mapping Matrix is designed to answer a simple but critical question: which solutions support which use cases?

With input from the Working Group, we finalised a shared set of use cases across five key areas:

1. Planning
2. Activation
3. Measurement
4. Optimisation
5. Infrastructure

These range from familiar capabilities like audience activation, contextual targeting, and campaign reporting, to more complex and emerging areas such as clean room–based planning, federated learning infrastructure, probabilistic cohorts, attention measurement, and machine-learning model training systems.Using this agreed-upon framework, we have already drafted an initial matrix for ID-less solutions. We are now applying the exact same use-case framework to ID-based solutions, so that the industry can compare approaches on a like-for-like basis.

Why This Matters

Across committees, markets, and conversations, we see the same challenge: a lack of shared, practical knowledge about available solutions, the problems they solve, and how they are used, which slows adoption, creates confusion for publishers, advertisers, agencies, and platforms under growing regulatory and technical pressure, and this is why this work builds on the Addressability & Measurement Solutions Report to turn insights into something tangible and usable.

By grounding the discussion in clearly defined use cases, the Solution Mapping Matrix aims to:

• Reduce ambiguity around addressability and measurement solutions
• Provide a neutral reference point for privacy-first approaches
• Help the ecosystem move from theory to implementation
• Support future work, including infographics, interactive tools, and deeper educational content

What Comes Next

Once both the ID and ID-less matrices are complete, the Working Group will:

• Convert the mappings into clear, accessible infographics
• Explore a more interactive version of the landscape
• Potentially develop a conversational interface (custom GPT) to allow stakeholders to query the ecosystem directly
• Collect short and long-form use-case definitions, written by practitioners, to bring consistency to how these concepts are understood and discussed

How to Participate

Please review the shared document and add your company/products in the “ID Matrix” tab, selecting the appropriate use-case checkboxes. Examples are already included to guide you.

The deadline to participate is Friday, 6th February. 

Your contribution will directly shape how the industry understands and advances addressability and measurement in a privacy-first era.

Specifically, we are looking for your help to add your company and/or products to the ID Matrix and select the relevant use-case checkboxes that your solution supports.

For additional information and questions, please reach out to:

Marie-Clare Puffett puffett [at] iabeurope.eu 
Lucio Gagliardi gagliardi [at] iabeurope.eu