Release Notes: Neustar launches Fabrick

Neustar’s recent launch of Fabrick—an eco-system rather than a unitary solution—reflects the growing realization among martech and adtech vendors that innovation is needed to meet the challenge of the post-cookie and privacy-driven world.

A multi-faceted approach. Devon DeBlasio, Product Marketing Director at Neustar, explained the thinking behind Fabrick. “Fabrick is not one singular thing,” he said. “We’ve been relying on a single text file to support all of programmatic media. There’s not going to be a singular replacement for the cookie, so what we’ve done is group together a multi-faceted approach that replaces the cookie and other perishable identifiers now.”

Neustar aims to work directly with publishers and platforms on identity resolution. “We have access to a very large repository of offline identity data from very sources accumulated over the years. In the risk and fraud business, and the security and communications business, we’ve used identity to verify the identity of an individual or a household—for example, for credit card transactions. With these perishable digital identifiers going away, they will likely be replaced by some persistent identifier.”

Persistent identifiers. The persistent identifier will be based on components such as name, address, phone number, or encrypted or hashed email, he explained. “We’ve already established connections with supply-side platforms, as well as directly with publishers, as well as many of the top walled gardens,” he said. While obscuring any user-level information, this enables marketers to be supplied with granular user data for targeting or media measurement.

“In addition, we’re also integrating with data providers with second-party data, and created a marketplace for our advertisers for user information at an aggregate level,” he said. “We have to work with some of those contextual data providers in order to get information that will facilitate some sort of addressable media or targeting.”

Triggered re-targeting. Is this strategy going to support the familiar programmatic re-targeting strategies, which lead to consumers being pursued across channels and devices with ads for a product or service they had researched? “If you visited a website and didn’t self-identify, a contextual data provider is going to look at some behaviors on the website, put that into a bucket of, say, a thousand users, and an anonymized version of your interaction with the website will be provided—through a real-time API—to another provider, who will create some sort of trigger-based engagement that will provide you with some more information or an ad.”

Why we care. Fabrick seems an appropriate name, as Neustar seeks to stitch together the tapestry of identity within an infrastructure aimed at enabling actioning messages to those (anonymous) identities in real-time and at scale. Many vendors are creating tapestries of this kind right now, and they all look a little different.