Accelerating Secure, Interoperable Identity Collaboration: The Trade Desk and Databricks Partnership

Databricks is pleased to announce a new technology integration with The Trade Desk, enabling direct support for Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) within the Databricks Data Clean Room. This collaboration enhances the ability of advertisers, agencies, and media partners to execute identity-driven insights and activation workflows in a secure, privacy-conscious environment.

With UID2 now natively supported in Databricks, customers can align their identity resolution and audience management strategies directly with The Trade Desk’s open-source identity framework. This integration empowers data teams to operationalize UID2 within Databricks’ unified analytics and governance architecture, eliminating the need to move or copy data to external systems.

Key Capabilities

• Native support for UID2 resolution and encryption workflows within Databricks Data Clean Rooms, leveraging Unity Catalog for centralized data governance and access control.
• Secure identity interoperability between partner datasets using Databricks’ Delta Sharing protocol and clean room APIs, ensuring all data collaborations remain within compliance boundaries.
• Direct lineage and observability for all UID2-related transformations and joins, enabling transparent auditing and policy traceability.
• Streamlined integration between UID2 identifiers and The Trade Desk activation ecosystem, allowing advertisers to connect offline or first-party signals with open internet inventory securely and efficiently.
• Self-service support for marketers/advertisers through Databricks Apps

Use UID2s in The Trade Desk to:

• Directly target your existing customers and prospects with relevant, personalized messaging
• Control frequency holistically at the person and household level across all channels
• Create cross-device look-a-like audiences
• Use as a seed for campaign relevance and optimization for our AI powered decisioning

Technical Benefits

This integration extends the flexibility of Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform to identity workflows. By embedding UID2 into the Databricks Clean Room, teams can leverage existing compute resources, ML models, and ETL pipelines for identity matching, campaign measurement, and audience analysis—all while maintaining strict data governance at the column and row level.

The Secure Clean Room environment ensures that all UID2 operations, including decoding, enrichment, and aggregation, occur within the customer’s Databricks workspace. Participating organizations never exchange raw PII, and all calculations are performed via programmable, policy-enforced queries.

Enabling Composable Data Collaboration

The partnership reflects both companies’ commitment to open, interoperable, and privacy-conscious data ecosystems. The Trade Desk’s UID2 specification provides a consistent, consent-based identity layer for addressable advertising. When integrated with the Databricks Data Clean Room and Databricks Apps, it enables composable, code-driven analytics and activation pipelines that bridge data science, marketing, and ad operations teams.

“Our collaboration with Databricks marks an important step toward a more open and interoperable advertising ecosystem,” said Gabe Richman, GM of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk. “With Unified ID 2.0 supported in the Databricks environment, advertisers and data partners can securely connect their first-party data to drive more relevant and measurable campaigns across the open internet.”

This capability is available today for Databricks and The Trade Desk customers looking to incorporate UID2 into their data collaboration and activation workflows. Contact your Databricks or The Trade Desk representative to get started.

“This partnership exemplifies the direction the industry is heading – toward composable, privacy-first data collaboration,” said Roger Beharry, Research Director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications, IDC. “By combining The Trade Desk’s open identity framework with Databricks’ unified governance and clean room architecture, marketers can achieve addressability and measurement at scale without compromising consumer trust or data compliance.”