From waste to win: The incrementality revolution in advertising

More than half of programmatic advertising impressions are discarded because they don’t have matched user IDs, but an incrementality revolution is under way to change that.

As Mattia Fosci, CEO at Anonymised, an ID-less ads and audience data platform, explains, this is a huge opportunity that is now being converted into measurable and usable inventory… 

Sixty percent of programmatic impressions globally don’t have matched user IDs, making them un-targetable and unmeasurable by traditional standards.

Incrementality solution

This represents a massive missed opportunity that we’re now converting into a purely incremental advertising channel through innovative partnerships with major SSPs – and the implications for campaign measurement and performance are revolutionary.

The mathematics underlying this opportunity are both compelling and sobering. When 60% of impressions lack ID matches, bid density rises dramatically on the remaining 40% of targetable inventory.

This artificial scarcity causes average CPMs to grow by 50% or more as advertisers unknowingly compete against themselves for the same limited pool of users.

Meanwhile, that missing 60% of impressions – representing premium inventory from quality publishers – often doesn’t even reach DSPs.

It’s simply discarded by the programmatic ecosystem as ‘unusable’ inventory, despite representing high-value audiences that would be highly relevant to many campaigns.

At Anonymised, we’ve developed end-to-end technology to target and measure this ‘unusable’ inventory.

This ‘ID-less pipe’ relies on three pillars:

1. On-device AI to aggregate cross-domain data and create stable audiences without relying on cookies or IDs;
2. Measurement technology that allows cohort-based attribution (for traditional media KPIs) and geo-based incrementality (for more sophisticated brands);
3. Custom bidding algorithms that influence traffic-shaping decisions and use ID-less (cohort-based or geo-based) conversion data to optimise campaigns towards advertiser outcomes.

These algorithms, developed in partnership with major SSPs including Index Exchange and OpenX, identify previously discarded impressions and add our proprietary signals to make them targetable through specialised bidding logic.

Everything bearing an ID-less badge that reaches the DSP becomes incremental by design because it represents inventory that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible through traditional programmatic channels.

A retail analogy helps illustrate the magnitude of this opportunity: imagine discovering that a major department store was discarding 60% of its merchandise because of minor, easily correctable issues – small tears, slightly faded colours or minor sizing inconsistencies.

You could acquire this discarded inventory, make the necessary corrections and resell it at full value. That’s essentially what we’re doing with programmatic advertising inventory, except the ‘defects’ are simply the absence of persistent user identifiers rather than any actual quality issues with the content or audiences.

Because ID-less impressions are excluded by default from standard media buys, ID-less is best treated as a distinct channel rather than a simple add-on to an existing programmatic campaign.

Standard DSP settings default on cookies, negating the incremental reach and efficiency benefits of ID-less campaigns. Setting up dedicated I/Os, budgets, bidding strategies and measurement frameworks for ID-less campaigns is the key to demonstrating incremental reach and performance.

This operational approach mirrors how sophisticated advertisers already manage different media channels, with ID-less being an incremental channel operating across the premium open web and CTV.

The timing for this approach couldn’t be more advantageous as the broader industry grapples with accelerating cookie deprecation and declining ID persistence across major browsers and mobile platforms.

Rather than viewing these changes as problems requiring defensive solutions, we’re embracing them as opportunities to unlock entirely new audience segments that were previously invisible to programmatic campaigns.

For advertisers willing to think strategically about channel diversification and incremental growth, ID-less represents far more than a tactical workaround for cookie deprecation. It’s a fundamental shift toward accessing genuinely untapped inventory that delivers measurable incrementality.

And an opportunity to support premium publishers who deserve fair compensation for creating the quality content environments that make effective advertising possible in the first place.