When you lose something important, you want to get it back. That’s the human instinct driving the conversation around signal loss. Marketers rightly feel an urgency to get back to a higher level of confidence targeting, attribution and measurement – particularly with broader economic pressures squeezing budgets.
But grasping for a new signal is not the way forward. In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, no one signal is ever going to keep up. And the dynamic and fleeting nature of modern consumers’ behaviors and interests inherently limits the shelf life of any signal.
The industry needs to reframe the goal: Rather than solving for signal loss, we need to build more agile approaches to identity resolution that embrace and orchestrate the multitude of constantly evolving and rapidly deteriorating signals.
Quick fixes aren’t the answer
The first inklings of cookie deprecation roused the excitement of the major walled gardens of the digital ecosystem.
Indeed, walled gardens provide good identity resolution within their walls. But they’re limited by definition. Hedged gardens are a marginal improvement, but they won’t always be easy to access.
Marketers can’t afford to put all their eggs in the wrong basket. The bigger lesson from cookie deprecation is that marketers shouldn’t be putting all their eggs in any basket – walled garden, a single universal ID or otherwise.
Rather, marketers need to acknowledge and prepare for a world in which signal loss is constant and unavoidable. As the digital ecosystem evolves at an increasing pace, online identities will only become more fragmented and complex to resolve. We need to collectively focus on the goal of the open internet. And the only path froward is to rally behind a more agnostic, future-proof approach to identity resolution. An approach that fundamentally prioritizes agility to adapt to new identifiers and new data streams as they emerge – and gives marketers the tools to synthesize a more holistic and persistent signal from all the noise.
Four keys to a future-proof approach to identity resolution
The good news is we already have the technology to tackle complex, agnostic, omnichannel identity resolution.
To build a more agile, future-proof approach, marketers need to use modern identity graphs centered on four key principles:
1. Start with a solid foundation in offline identity–first practices
People are constantly getting new phones, new laptops and new TVs. New apps pop up regularly. But the core elements of offline identity are much less volatile: your name, your email address and your phone number.
A modern identity graph needs to make the most of this stability. For example, at Experian, we’re able to leverage our strong and established offline identity profiles as the steady foundation for identity resolution.
2. Tie online and offline profiles together through privacy–first practices
In working to tie the offline and online worlds together marketers should look to build their graphs around a pseudonymized, established and stable identifier: hashed emails. Marketers know that email addresses are the gold standard for persistent identifiers, with the typical consumer maintaining the same primary email address or multiple email addresses across devices and throughout life stages.
Profiles and identifiers must be anonymized before using them to connect the online and offline worlds to preserve user privacy. Hashed emails provide a reliable link between these worlds that enables marketers to build out a more robust offline identity profile, while preserving anonymity. Companies can connect first-party data from POS systems, loyalty programs, financial institutions, etc., to fill in the full picture of a consumer or target audience while still leveraging online activities to better understand their consumers. Even in our digital-first world, this rich offline data provides critical insights.
3. Create agnostic, future-ready architecture–first practices
To be agile and future-ready, marketers need graph technologies that go beyond resolving activity and identifiers within a walled garden or a limited ecosystem of integrated platforms. They also need graphs that aren’t over-reliant on proprietary universal identifiers that may not exist in a few years (or even a few months).
Marketers need to seek out graph technologies built with fully agnostic architecture – designed to work with any and all platforms and providers, ready to leverage new identifiers as they emerge and able to ingest any data stream from any source.
This supports a truly future-proof approach. Marketers should use an identity graph that will adapt and evolve rapidly as customers’ behaviors and interests change, as devices and channels change and as identifiers and other elements of the tech ecosystem change.
4. Leveraging high-fidelity probabilistic matching–first practices
Marketers crave the simple assurance of authenticated, deterministic identity. But the reality is a huge amount of online (and offline) activity can’t be authenticated.
Today, leading platforms use modern AI and machine learning to deliver high-fidelity probabilistic matching powered by cross-device deterministic identifiers to achieve an accurate and scalable view of consumers.
This hybrid approach not only solves for traditional problems like users who aren’t logged in. It dramatically expands the scope of an identity graph to include virtually any data stream, online or offline.
Marketers can identify customers and target audiences by the devices they’re using and the media they’re consuming. Then, they can layer on additional behavioral and demographic data to get a broader, deeper understanding of consumers – and get increasingly precise with targeting, messaging and measurement.
Advertisers can also leverage a modern, agnostic identity graph to consolidate data from various buy- and sell-side platforms. Integrating data from multiple platforms and unifying user activity through identity graphs drives powerful spend optimization, from revealing high-impact touch points in the customer journey to enabling data-driven decisioning on channel mix.
A sweeter vision for the cookieless future
While the walled gardens compete to expand their kingdoms and universal ID providers fight to break down those walls, forward-thinking marketers increasingly recognize that they don’t need to be limited by any of this. By building out an agnostic identity graph, they can create an identity resolution solution that transcends channels and devices.
They can merge offline and digital behavior through privacy-safe practices – resolving mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), CTV IDs, hashed emails, IP addresses and cookieless IDs back to anonymized offline profiles powered by name, email and phone to get an omnichannel view of one household or individual. And they can use that broader, deeper and more persistent view of the consumer to drive more relevant targeting, more personalized messaging and smarter marketing spend that drives greater value for their businesses.
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