As the advertising world prepares for a world without third-party cookies, many of the alternative “identity graph” approaches start with email addresses.

LiveIntent is looking forward to that world. It is an ad-tech vendor whose technology already has sight of more than three billion unique online identifiers.

Its nonID identifier uses email newsletters – a decades-old media channel that has been enjoying a renaissance lately – to offer advertisers profiles of real audience members.

And now Rubicon Project, the ad sell-side platform, is tapping LiveIntent to leverage that identifier.

Crossing the rubicon

The pair announced this month that Rubicon would use nonID to offer advertisers a way to find ad inventory across their publishers in a way that does not rely on third-party cookies, which are being deprecated by browser makers.

“They can upload their CRM file, onboard their CRM file to our world,” says Brian Silver, President of LiveIntent, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“And then we’re able to create for them a Deal ID, which they can put into header solutions like Prebid and actually find their audiences for a rather good price across the web, and more specifically, right now, within Safari and Firefox and in the future, even Chrome.”

Newsletter boom

LiveIntent’s reliance on email newsletters may be fortuitous because Silver says he is seeing booming usage during the pandemic.

“We have seen a massive increase of supply,” he says. “If you think about everyone being in their inbox all day long, the number of newsletters that people are signing up for and the number of newsletters that people are reading has increased dramatically.

“Our identity graph is created by having tags in the email newsletter, but also on webpages. Our linkages get created when someone opens up their newsletter in their inbox. Our linkages get authenticated again and again, each time, each day.”

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews