Ep 1: CMPs and the TC string

Your banner sends buyers one coded line. What’s in it.

It’s the TC string. Your CMP, or consent management platform, writes it to record each visitor’s choices.

Say a reader in Berlin opens news.example. The banner lists numbered purposes, like purpose one, storing data on her device, and vendors, each with an ID. Google’s is seven five five. She says yes to purposes one, three and four, building and using an ad profile. The CMP stores each choice as a bit, one for yes, zero for no, and packs the bits into a short text string. Prebid.js attaches it to every bid request, with a flag saying GDPR applies. Each buyer checks its own bit.

Today, load your site as a European visitor and paste the string into a free TC string decoder. Check your key vendors are in it.

Next… TCF version two point three, and the February cutoff.