What the Tech are SSOs?

Sometimes life can feel like a never-ending cycle of trying to remember your password, failing to remember your password, resetting your password — only to forget it again next time you want to sign-in.

Single sign-on solutions (SSOs, for shorthand) offer a potential solution to the password-weary public, allowing consumers to use a single sign-in credential to access their myriad online services.

SSOs are also important to digital marketers who rely on user sign-ins to track consumer behavior and use it to target ads and assess the performance of their campaigns. Handy as they are, SSOs have their downsides. Here, we explain what SSOs are, how they work and their implications for the digital marketing industry.

What are SSOs?

SSOs first gained popularity in the workplace as a convenient way for companies to handle cybersecurity. Instead of having employees sign-in to all the different tech platforms they use in a day — such as Slack, Salesforce, Outlook, etc. — employees can use one sign-in credential to access all of the platforms they need for work. Companies such as Okta, Oracle and SecureAuth all offer single sign-on identity solutions.

The concept has gained prominence on the consumer internet, too. For years, consumers have been able to use their Facebook and Google accounts to sign-in to various websites and services. More recently, Apple allowed iPhone users to sign in to apps using their Apple IDs.

The appeal of SSOs is convenience. With them, consumers don’t need to create a new profile from scratch every time they sign up for a new service. They also don’t need to remember so many passwords.

How do SSOs affect marketing?

SSOs have been heralded by some as a potential solution to the gradual pivot away from third-party tracking cookies, the tiny pieces of software that brands have used for decades to collect data about consumers and target them with ads.

Cookies allow brands to assess consumer behavior across different web properties. Without them, brands will have less insight into consumer behavior and the performance of their own ad campaigns, leaving a huge void in the industry. And though Google recently reversed course on its plan to deprecate cookies in its Chrome web browser, the marketing industry continues to build for a future where cookies are less significant.

SSOs can, in theory, help solve for this by giving marketers insight into customers’ activities across the web. If a person uses the same SSO to sign into various websites, all of their activity is tied to that login, allowing marketers to build a robust profile of that consumer’s browsing and consumption habits.

But like many of the proposed cookie alternatives, SSOs are not without some shortcomings.

Are all SSOs created equal?

Not necessarily.

Certain SSOs can further consolidate data, and thus power, in the hands of a few behemoth tech companies, which allow users one-click access to a wide range of applications via their respective platforms.

But in some cases this cedes power to those tech giants who already control the vast majority of advertising in both the U.S. and worldwide, causing many to complain that their success comes at the expense of small publishers and innovation in the industry. With their SSO authentications, these large tech companies could gobble up even more data from publishers, giving them insight into consumer behavior across a wide range of websites and potentially an even greater stranglehold on the industry.

What are the alternatives?

A better alternative is for publishers to use SSOs that still allow the publisher to collect first-party data of users on their website. It’s an email login powered by a SSO, but still allows publishers to create a direct relationship with their user.

One such solution is The Trade Desk’s SSO, OpenPass, which allows audiences to share their email addresses directly with publishers. Advertisers can use alternative identifiers to activate these audiences across different websites on the open internet, creating more relevant ad experiences and helping publishers better monetize their content. The net result is a privacy-conscious method for collecting data and tracking campaign performance. In effect, it’s an SSO for the open internet that is superior to third-party cookies while allowing publishers and advertisers control of their own data.

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk, Inc.