All playersSee full lifecycle →
Identity layer · position 6 / 8 · DMP
DMP / CDP
Holds audience segments and identity graphs.
"The address book that knows which neighborhoods care about which ads."
By the numbers
Latency
5–25ms lookup
Scale
Billions of IDs
Common vendors
LiveRamp · Salesforce CDP · UID 2.0
In the flow
Where DMP / CDP sits
Fun facts
Reshuffle for more — each fact links to its source.
BlueKai — the original DMP — was sold to Oracle for ~$400M in 2014 and quietly shut down in 2022 after a data leak exposed billions of records.
failure·Krebs on Security
LiveRamp's RampID is a pseudonymous identifier built on top of hashed email — it powers most non-cookie audience matching in the US.
spec·LiveRamp
UID 2.0 was open-sourced by The Trade Desk in 2021 specifically so it wouldn't be seen as a single-company replacement for cookies.
history·UID2 docs
Receives from (upstream)
Sends to (downstream)
Inputs
- · First/third-party data
- · IDs (IFA, UID2, hashed email)
Outputs
- · Segment membership for targeting
Protocols on the wire
UID 2.0RampIDIAB IFA
Key KPIs
Match rateSegment freshness
Appears in lifecycle
Under the hood
Post-cookie, identity flows through alternative IDs and clean-room joins. CDPs (Segment, Hightouch) increasingly replace classic DMPs for first-party data activation.
Active recall
Test what you know about DMP / CDP.