On Identity: In Conversation with The Trade Desk’s Samantha Jacobson
- Posted by Matilde Salvetti
- On Apr 02, 2025
The third installment of our Identity 2025 blog series is about the keynote session with Samantha Jacobson, Chief Strategy Officer & EVP of The Trade Desk and Mathieu Roche, Co-Founder & CEO of ID5.
If you have missed the previous recaps, access the blog post on the “M&A in Adtech: Key Insights from 2024 and Bold Predictions for 2025” here and the “Universal IDs in Numbers: Insights from the Bidstream and Bid Requests” here.
The session explored why Identity plays a central role for The Trade Desk, emphasizing that it underpins their entire offering and is therefore essential to ensuring that their approach prioritizes consumer privacy. This highlighted the need for TTD and other ad tech companies to work with identity providers and partners to uphold privacy and transparency across the ecosystem.
The discussion veered onto the Premium Internet – a term The Trade Desk uses to describe “the best of the open internet”, where consumers and advertisers turn to for professional and premium content. Samantha emphasized that publishers operating in this space should have an open discussion with their audiences about advertising and the role it plays in monetizing their content. For example, The Guardian, which was mentioned in the session, recently launched “Ad-Lite”, a subscription product for people who want to opt out of personalised ads.
The session then focused on omnichannel activation and the need for interconnected data. With the enormous fragmentation across devices, having a unified view of consumer identity is crucial to activate omnichannel strategies and create personalized experiences for the end user.
Finally, Mathieu and Samantha discussed the importance of measurement, not just to ensure that content reaches the target audience, but also to give advertisers the tools to understand the impact of their messages and campaigns and act on those insights effectively.
To conclude, the session focused on the need for collaboration in adtech and highlighted how the ID5 and The Trade Desk partnership helps drive performance and create more meaningful experiences for consumers.
For a deeper dive into identity, omnichannel activation, and measurement, watch the full session here.