A group of the world’s most prominent advertising trade associations and major companies from across the advertising industry, such as Ford, Unilever, NBC Universal, and Adobe, have joined forces to protect customisation and analytics, safeguard privacy, and improve customer experience within digital media and advertising.

The Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, led by the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Bill Tucker as Executive Director, will convene four working groups of industry stakeholders focusing on business practices; technical standards; privacy, policy, and legal considerations; and communications & education.

“In the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, the city collapsed because its inhabitants lost the ability to speak a common language,” said Tucker. “The digital advertising industry faces a comparable challenge around addressability today, as recent changes announced by operating systems, browsers, and other technologies, if implemented, will significantly impact the traditional marketplace language of cookies and mobile IDs. The Partnership was created to serve as a collaborative forum for our industry to ensure addressability standards that preserve privacy, provide a consistent and effective framework for advertisers, and enrich the consumer experience.”

The Partnership will boast trade association members including the ANA, American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), IAB Tech Lab, Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).

Brands represented include Ford, General Motors, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and NBC Universal, while agencies come in the form of Publicis Media and IPG Mediabrands’ UM. Representing the ad tech and martech spaces are Adobe, MediaMath, and The Trade Desk.

The Partnership’s initial principles

1. Consumer privacy should remain a foundational pillar of the solution by providing consumers with meaningful transparency and controls, giving the marketplace the tools to understand consumer preferences and the ability to abide by those preferences.
2. Consumers should have access to diverse and competitive content offerings, supported by their choices to engage with digital advertising in exchange for content and services.
3. Business operations, including ad targeting, ad delivery, frequency capping, campaign management, analytics, cross-channel deployment, optimisation, and attribution should be sufficiently supported and improved upon through better technological and policy standards for all critical use cases.
4. Solutions should be standardised and interoperable for consumers and businesses across browsers, devices, and platforms, subject to applicable privacy laws and guidelines and to the extent it is reasonably technically feasible, efficient, effective, and improved over existing technology.
5. All browsers, devices, and platforms should allow equal access, free from unreasonable interference, to the new solutions.
6. Companies that utilise the resulting solutions should follow industry and legal privacy standards, with strong accountability and enforcement for those that violate the standards.