DevCon 2026 Keynote for Publishers

Hello, and welcome to this business demonstration of the 51Degrees Identifier and related technologies.

So I'm going to show you, using real publishers, all the new tech that 51Degrees has brought out in practice, active today, to show what could be possible in the very near future if publishers and advertisers want to make the shift.

So you come to yoursite.51degrees.com, and you can actually enter any URL.

We've pre-loaded a couple.

I'm going to start with The Guardian.

And I come in, and I get a totally different experience as far as that first interaction is concerned.

I get asked very simply, what marketing experience would I like?

I can find out more information about what standard and personalized mean, and then I can choose one.

Or if I'm unhappy, I can go to pay for access.

I'm going to choose personalized.

What I could then do, if The Guardian wanted to, with other publishers, is share that across other publishers.

That could be a group that come together, or it could ultimately be all publishers.

Who knows?

But certainly, it can be shared among a network of publishers.

What happens is, when I've responded to that, I can see how long the advertising took to load.

Because of the changes that we're making, that can happen a lot quicker.

So we loaded 10 adverts.

This is a fake environment, so we've got four direct and six programmatic have come in.

Now, a big problem for the advertising and publishing industry is click fraud.

So I'm going to look at this technology and see how it can be used to prevent click fraud.

So if I click on this advert, I'm going to go across to the advertiser.

And at the moment, the advertiser's got very little to work on in terms of where that click came from.

So if I click on there, I've come through to the advertiser, and I get my little green icon in the top left-hand corner.

If I select that, I get a dialogue come up that tells me a little bit about that click.

So the top part is the information that you get today.

It's useful, but actually, did it really come from the same browser?

Did it really come from the publisher that claims it to have come from?

So if we scroll down, we can see a little bit more about the 51Degrees identifier.

So here's part of the string.

It's just a Base64 string.

We can see it's a probabilistic identifier.

So that's the one we're using in this demo, but you could also use hashed email if you had an email address available, or just a random identifier for the purposes of just managing that click.

We can see that it's enabled for personalized marketing.

So that's reflecting the response that we gave to the preference platform at the beginning.

And we can see that the caller stated it directly.

So it's not derived from another signal, like a TCF string or something like that.

There's a short domain that can be used in order to verify it.

That's what's actually driving the green tick in this user interface.

And there's an identifier that we can use, as 51Degrees, to work out who we created it for.

So if this ever turned up in any sort of dark pool of data or something like that, then we could actually find out who we created it for.

And we can see it's two minutes old.

Not unreasonable for a click from a publisher page.

If it was 30 minutes, maybe that would be a problem.

Then we've got a link to the terms and conditions that cover the transfer of the data from the publisher to the advertiser.

This is the Model Terms for Marketing.

This is something we developed with Movement for an Open Web.

What the Model Terms for Marketing do is protect data, covered data, by ensuring that the things that could be done with that data, the uses that that data could be put to, are restricted so that that data is not personal data.

So no re-identification, no re-linking, no graphs, anything like that.

It's about creating data that can be used for frequency capping, for attribution, for billing, for dealing with issues like fraud, et cetera.

The primary things that are needed to make digital advertising work.

If we scroll down, we can see that the signature is verifiable, so we can see that it definitely came from 51Degrees, and we can see that the context is the same, so that it's happening in the same browser or the same app.

If I copy the link and now take that click and play it back in another browser, which is different, then the same page comes up, as you'd expect, but I get a red icon there in the top left-hand corner.

And if I scroll down, I get all the same information.

Time's marched on a little bit while I've been talking.

And it verifies.

Of course it would.

It's just a cryptographic signature, and it's still valid.

But the context has changed.

So the identifier was created in a different context to the one that it's now being received in, and that might be considered suspicious.

Do people really click a link, and then it turns up in a different browser?

Well, maybe, maybe not.

It's up to you to decide what to do with it.

But the advertiser or the advertiser's supplier might use this information to identify suspicious activity and treat it differently.

If I go back to our original browser, and I'll go back to the publisher, what I can do is try another site.

So let's take Time Out, for example.

And I don't get asked again because it's been shared across other publishers.

I've got the advertising loading in.

If I go down and find one of those adverts, again, the same thing.

I get my green icon created for a different publisher and the probabilistic identifier there as well.

So all of this depends on the Model Terms for Marketing to protect the data as it's transferred through a wider and broader ecosystem.

The Model Terms for Marketing protect data by binding each of the parties' current contracts, incorporating the Model Terms for Marketing in those contracts, so that data that flows between parties can be protected through these standard Model Terms.

So people don't have to reinvent what might be considered good practice.

The data can be used for personalization if the user's presented a signal that allows it, and the data is restricted in terms of what it can be used for.

So billing, frequency capping, attribution, reporting, certain types of personalization when allowed, but not identity linking and that kind of stuff.

Absolutely prohibited.

As far as 51Degrees is concerned, if you want to access these identifiers, then we need you to help us.

So we need you to go through a Know Your Customer check so we know who you are.

We don't just take people on for this product off the click wrap agreements.

And then we also need to look at your insurance as well to make sure that you have protection to cover a breach of the Model Terms.

And those are the two things that we need, and then you're good to go.

So thank you for your time.

We've got more resources for developers.

You can play with the demo.

If you click on the top left-hand corner, it brings up a QR code, so you can take it away with you.

There's links around the video, and you can show this to other people, and please pass it on.

What we're doing here is showing what the world could look like in the near future.

The technology exists today.

It's up to you whether you want to make it happen and how quickly.

Thank you.

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