For years, media measurement has been a tradeoff between speed and depth. Aggregated insights arrive fast, but are shallow and incomplete. Log-level exposure data provides depth, but takes days to resolve and even longer to analyze.
Today, Hightouch is partnering with The Trade Desk to eliminate that tradeoff.
With Exposure Log Matching, Hightouch’s Match Booster customers can quickly resolve exposure logs from The Trade Desk directly to their own consented customer and household IDs in the warehouse, without being locked into another vendor’s proprietary ID.
This gives analysts and AI agents the full context they need to measure and act on ad performance across campaigns, customers, and business outcomes.
What exposure logs unlock
The Trade Desk’s Raw Event Data Stream (REDS) delivers detailed context on every consented impression, click, video view, and conversion to the customer’s data warehouse. Logs include detailed metadata on things like campaign, publisher, and even the weather conditions when an ad was served.
Once exposure logs land in the warehouse and are resolved back to customer data, they become much more than a collection of charts:
- Analysts can understand performance by customer segment, household, region, SKU, LTV tier, and membership status.
- Media networks can combine onsite and offsite ad exposures to measure omnichannel attribution and surface dashboards to their advertisers (one of several ways media networks are reclaiming ownership of their stack).
- AI agents can traverse exposures, customers, and financial outcomes in seconds to uncover hidden patterns, provide detailed campaign recommendations, and act autonomously to adjust bids, budgets, and creative.
But to get the benefits of exposure log data, teams have to resolve bidstream identifiers like UID2s, MAIDs, and cookies to customer records that may not exist in the brand's warehouse.
Example exposure log output
The exposure gap
Without a way to translate bidstream identifiers back to consented customer or household records, the data is hard to use for serious measurement.
Traditionally, brands have closed this gap using third-party identity providers.
The traditional workflows function, but are slow and fragmented. They depend on file transfers and multi-day turnaround times. The matching process relies entirely on third-party data, resulting in unresolved records and inaccurate reporting. And the bridge between ad exposure and customer data is controlled by a vendor whose business depends on owning that bridge.
Exposure log matching using third-party data
A simpler approach: resolve directly to your own customer ID
Exposure Log Matching is a warehouse-native solution that combines first and third-party data to enhance match rates, without identity lock-in.
Match Booster resolves exposure logs directly to the brand's own primary key, whether that is a customer ID, household ID, or another pseudonymous identifier used across the business. It starts with consented first-party signals and falls back to consented third-party data only where needed to fill gaps.
The resolved exposure logs are delivered straight into the customer’s data warehouse, ready to be joined directly to consented customer records for analysis and activation.
The result is simple: the same exposure logs, now keyed to consented identifiers the business owns, delivered straight into the warehouse for use by analysts and AI agents.
Exposure log matching using Hightouch
Why this matters now
Two shifts make this solution more important than ever:
First, AI has raised the value of log-level exposure data. Analysts could always use it, but only to answer a question or two at a time. AI agents can reason continuously across exposure logs, customer data, and financial outcomes and autonomously optimize performance. But only if the data is quickly available and connected to the context layer in the data warehouse.
Second, brands and media networks are reevaluating the identity and measurement infrastructure they depend on. They want neutral alternatives. They want control over their context layer. And they do not want measurement locked into someone else's proprietary graph.
Exposure Log Matching answers both: it seamlessly connects exposure logs to the context layer in the warehouse for analysts and AI agents to use, and it does so without locking customers into another vendor’s proprietary ID.
Closing the gap between exposure and performance
Hightouch’s Exposure Log Matching partnership with The Trade Desk eliminates the tradeoff between speed and depth, closing the gap between ad exposure and the customer context that brands and media networks need to measure and improve performance.
That means faster reporting, better attribution, clearer proof for advertisers, and a stronger foundation for the AI agents that will increasingly shape how modern media buying gets done.
To get started, contact our team or your representative at The Trade Desk.
