OS Data Solutions, the data and targeting subsidiary of German media group Ströer, today added the Utiq ID to its audience segments, attaching an identifier derived from telecom operator networks to profiles it sells for programmatic campaigns. According to a post on the company's LinkedIn page, the enhanced audiences are available immediately through Active Agent, The Trade Desk and Equativ, with Adform planned for early next year. The post gives no reach, match rate or pricing figures.

In Short

A German company that sorts website visitors into groups advertisers can buy, such as people interested in cars, has added a new way to recognise those people when an ad is about to be shown. The new tag comes from Utiq, a company owned by four large phone networks, and it only exists for people who said yes to it on a website and use one of those networks. Advertisers buying these groups on three platforms may now find more of the people in them on browsers that block cookies, although no figures say how many.

What the post says

The announcement is short. Published in German and English on the company page of OS Data Solutions (OSDS), it runs to four paragraphs and a quote, and it does not link to a press release or to any technical documentation.

"We're enhancing our audiences with the deterministic, consent-based Utiq ID," the company wrote. "This allows relevant signals to be matched more reliably, building even more precise audience segments across multiple visits."

The second paragraph describes what is meant to change when a campaign runs. "The additional, persistent ID increases the likelihood of recognizing users from built segments during campaign delivery in supported browser and app environments - including cookieless environments."

Then comes the distribution. "The enhanced audiences are available immediately via Active Agent, The Trade Desk, and the curation platform Equativ. Availability via Adform is planned for early next year."

Tobias Emmer, managing director at OSDS, is the only person quoted. "Utiq adds a powerful deterministic signal to our data foundation. This allows us to match relevant data points more reliably and make our already high-quality audiences even more precise for activation in the open web."

Utiq answered under the post from its own company account: "Great to be partnering with you OS Data Solutions!"

Several things are missing. The post does not say how many OSDS profiles carry a Utiq identifier, which of Utiq's identifiers OSDS uses, which browsers and apps count as "supported", whether the offer is limited to Germany, how the segments are priced, or when exactly in early 2027 the Adform integration is due. No test results are cited.

Who OS Data Solutions is

OSDS was founded in June 2019 as a joint venture of the Ströer group and Otto Group, according to the company's own history page. When the venture was announced in May 2019, the trade publication Horizont described it as a pool of no fewer than 50 million data records combining Ströer's digital reach with the customer data segments of Otto Group Media. Ströer became the sole owner in January 2023, and in September 2024 the company dropped "& Co. KG" from its name to become OS Data Solutions GmbH. It is registered in Hamburg.

The company's website claims more than 1,500 standard segments built on more than 50 million unique users across the Ströer portfolio. It lists data from more than 130,000 PAYBACK panelists and from more than 23 million registered XING users as further sources. The identifiers it names are cookies, mobile advertising IDs and ID5 IDs, and its products also include contextual targeting and a real-time targeting product that works without identifiers.

ID5 has been part of the offer since January 2021. Test campaigns that ran from May 17 to May 31, 2021 with a major German publisher showed a 28% increase in reach across all browsers for the ID5 ID compared with the cookie, according to results published by ExchangeWire on September 23, 2021. The same tests reported eight times more impressions on Safari and 16 times more on Firefox.

OSDX and the Virtual Minds connection

The Utiq addition comes less than two months after a larger change to the company's plumbing. In September 2026, OSDS moved its Multi-ID Audiences off The Adex, the data management platform operated by Virtual Minds, and onto OSDX, a platform it controls directly alongside its contextual and geo data. The Trade Desk was the first external partner integrated with OSDX, making the data available inside its Kokai buying platform for connected TV, mobile, desktop, audio and digital out-of-home campaigns. OSDX also includes an MCP server through which AI applications and agents can check data availability and prepare activations.

Active Agent, the first platform named in today's post, is the demand-side platform of the same Virtual Minds group. Its website lists Active Agent next to The Adex, the Adition ad server, the Yieldlab supply-side platform and the Media Manager TV product. So the September move took OSDS audiences off Virtual Minds' data platform, and today's distribution list puts Virtual Minds' buying platform first.

How the Utiq ID is built

Utiq is a Brussels-based company owned by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone, launched in 2023. Its identifier is a form of carrier data: it starts from the user's internet connection rather than from a cookie or a login.

Utiq's documentation sets out the sequence. Utiq first checks whether the service is available using the visitor's IP address. If it is, the IP address goes to the visitor's operator, which matches it to an account reference such as a mobile number and returns an identifier to Utiq, without passing on other personal data, according to the documentation. Utiq then derives two marketing identifiers from that network signal. The martechpass is valid for 90 days; the adtechpass, the token intended for advertising technology, is valid for 24 hours. First-party cookies store the consent choice, and a connectId cookie lasting 90 days lets Utiq recognise the visitor again without requesting a new network signal from the operator.

Consent is the gate. The technology is switched off by default and only activates once a visitor agrees, according to the documentation. Consent is given site by site, and only sites where a visitor has accepted receive the same identifier. A visitor can withdraw consent for a single site through a "Manage Utiq" link, which deletes the cookies and tokens immediately, or for every site at once through Utiq's consenthub portal, where the withdrawal applies about ten minutes later on the next visit.

Eligibility is narrower still. The service works only for customers of the participating telecom operators. A visitor who has never accepted Utiq on any site, or whose connection runs through a non-participating network, produces no Utiq signal at all.

What "deterministic" and "persistent" mean here

The post leans on two adjectives. "Deterministic" fits the mechanism: the identifier traces back to an operator account rather than to a statistical guess built from IP addresses and browser characteristics, which is the distinction PPC Land drew when it explained deterministic signals and listed Utiq among the telecom-based identity operators. An operator account, though, is not always one person. Utiq's documentation does not explain how a fixed-line broadband connection shared by a household is treated, and when Ad Alliance integrated Utiq, the RTL Deutschland sales house said it would use the signal partly to assign household devices to individual users.

"Persistent" is harder to square with the documentation. The adtechpass that advertising platforms receive lasts 24 hours, and the longer-lived martechpass and connectId cookie last 90 days. Nothing in the post says which of these OSDS relies on to link a visit to a segment, or how often profiles are refreshed.

Utiq's footprint

Utiq reported 70 million users across six European markets on November 15, 2025: Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the UK and Italy, with more than 300 publishers integrated. That is the most recent total. When Will Harmer took over as chief executive on July 1, 2026, succeeding founding chief Marc Bresseel, the company gave no updated figure. The 70 million also describes Utiq's whole network, not the share of the more than 50 million unique users behind OSDS segments that will now match.

In Germany, the deployment has moved publisher by publisher. Ad Alliance's first phase, announced on September 2, 2025, covered the n-tv, RTL and STERN mobile sites and made about 4 million users addressable. Later that month Utiq and Visoon brought the identifiers to HbbTV and connected TV, the first use of the consentpass system in television. Outside Germany, Utiq launched in the UK with Bauer Media Group, Immediate and Netmums in June 2025 and entered Italy through Adhub Media in July 2025.

OSDS is a different kind of partner from those publishers. It does not sell advertising space; it sells audience data that buyers can apply across inventory from many sellers. Whether a Utiq identifier is present when an OSDS segment is matched at auction therefore depends on the publisher's site having Utiq installed, the visitor having consented there, and the visitor's operator taking part.

Three platforms now, Adform later

All four platforms, or the groups they belong to, had a relationship with Utiq before today.

The Trade Desk added Utiq's telco identifiers to its EMEA identity portfolio on June 1, 2026, making them available in Kokai alongside EUID, UID2 and other partners. At the time, PPC Land noted that consent rates, match rates in the bidstream and the weight buyers would give Utiq against EUID were still unknown. OSDX data has been inside Kokai since September.

Equativ has handled Utiq audiences in its curation product since June 2024, when Utiq described the integration as its first feature-enabled SSP integration, covering France, Germany and Spain. Buyers select a single deal ID and activate it from any DSP connected to Equativ's supply-side platform. The German digital industry association BVDW, in a programmatic curation whitepaper released on February 26, 2026, defined the practice as the targeted selection, combination and enrichment of media inventory and data signals into packages built around campaign goals. Audience data with an added identifier is one of the layers such packages carry.

Adform, Equativ and Virtual Minds were among the 11 supply-side and inventory partners Utiq confirmed on January 8, 2025, together with Azerion, Exte, Index Exchange, Magnite, Onetag, PubMatic, Seedtag and TripleLift. That list concerned the sell side. Today's post concerns buying, and for Adform the timetable is only "early next year".

The Safari backdrop

The post does not mention Apple, but the phrase "cookieless environments" points at a problem that changed shape this autumn. Apple began rolling out iOS 27 on September 14, 2026, and Safari on updated iPhones and iPads now refuses to contact domains on a private Apple list. The only published version, from a WebKit bug report The Trade Desk filed on September 21, has nine entries. Two of them belong to ID5: id5-sync.com and eu-1-id5-sync.com. The code behind the block, 11 lines merged into WebKit on February 13, 2026, runs before tracker exemptions apply.

The Trade Desk's ad-serving domain was removed from the list in an iOS 27.2 beta. ID5's domains were not. An October 8 opinion column by ADOTAT founder Pesach Lattin stated that ID5 would not come off the list, without naming its source, and Apple has not explained the inclusion of any company. No Utiq domain appears among the nine published entries. AdExchanger reported on October 2 that the short list had been replaced by a remotely updated list of hundreds of companies, which Apple has not confirmed.

ID5 is the only alternative identifier OSDS names on its website. The post neither mentions ID5 nor gives a reason for the timing, so any link between the Safari changes and today's addition is not established by the company. What the sequence does show is a data seller adding a second alternative identifier, built in a structurally different way, at a moment when one browser is blocking specific identity vendors by domain.

Why buyers are watching

For advertisers and agencies buying OSDS segments, built on what the company says are more than 50 million unique users, the value of any segment depends on how often its members can be found at the moment of bidding. On Safari and Firefox, where third-party cookies no longer do that job, each extra identifier linked to a profile can raise the match rate. Whether this one does so at meaningful scale is not shown in the post.

The structure of the Utiq signal also limits what can be expected of it. It needs a participating operator, a site that runs Utiq and a visitor who opted in on that site, so its coverage follows publishers' integration decisions and readers' consent choices rather than OSDS's data. The Trade Desk said in June that there is no single solution to identity; OSDS now names at least four identifiers, cookies, mobile advertising IDs, ID5 IDs and Utiq, in addition to its ID-free contextual and real-time products.

Several questions remain open after today. How many OSDS profiles carry a Utiq identifier, and in which browsers? Does the segment price change when the identifier is present? Which Utiq token does the matching use, given the 24-hour validity of the adtechpass? And will the Adform integration arrive in the first quarter of 2027, or later? The post answers none of them.

Timeline

Summary

Who: OS Data Solutions (OSDS), the Hamburg-based data and targeting subsidiary of Ströer, led by managing director Tobias Emmer, and Utiq, the Brussels-based identity company owned by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone. The buying platforms named are Active Agent, part of the Virtual Minds group, The Trade Desk, Equativ and, from early 2027, Adform.

What: OSDS added the Utiq ID, a consent-based identifier derived from telecom operator networks, to its audience segments, saying it lets signals be matched more reliably across visits and raises the chance of recognising segment members in cookieless browser and app environments. The company published no reach, match rate, pricing or browser figures. Utiq's identifiers exist only for customers of participating operators who have accepted Utiq on a given site; the adtechpass is valid for 24 hours and the martechpass for 90 days.

When: The post appeared today. The audiences are available immediately through Active Agent, The Trade Desk and Equativ, and availability through Adform is planned for early next year.

Where: The announcement was made on LinkedIn, in German and English. OSDS builds its segments mainly on the Ströer portfolio in Germany, and Utiq operates in Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the UK and Italy.

Why: Identifiers determine how often an audience segment can be found at auction, and browsers such as Safari and Firefox do not support the cookies on which such segments were traditionally matched. OSDS previously named cookies, mobile advertising IDs and ID5 as its identifiers, and since September 2026 Safari on iOS 27 has blocked two ID5 domains. The company gave no reason for the timing, and the effect on match rates has not been published.