Getting to grips with AdTech’s identity problem

Daniel Landsman at Aerospike explains a route to identity management in a world where the cookie’s sun is setting 

Programmatic advertising, customer personalisation and attribution have all become more complicated. Changing regulations and the move towards a “cookie and device ID free” world have made it harder for marketers to understand customer journeys.

It is a change that has been coming for some time, but it appears many are struggling to make sense of how they move forward. For modern marketers, user profiles are customer identity – so this shift is a challenging time. The problem is not new, but time is now running out.

The transition means that the MarTech and AdTech platforms that stitch together identity from millions of data points from across the internet in real time and at unlimited scale are becoming crucial for driving the best business outcomes. This presents a real challenge for you as a marketing professional to manoeuvre into a position where you can take advantage of the benefits this new approach can bring to enhance your targeting, customer personalisation and attribution.

Choosing data sources to drive customer personalisation     

A vast array of third-party data sources are available, all of which can play a part in a company’s final identity management solution. However, no one identity solution dominates the market, or necessarily meets the needs of the marketing team.

This means companies must build marketing solutions that enable them to stay identity agnostic and take advantage of any number of identity sources to improve business outcomes, as well as have the flexibility to add or replace identity providers as they see fit. Every company is different, but we are working with several brands using four or five identity providers to support their real-time decisioning.  

A real-time graph database offers an exceptional foundation for these marketing challenges. Able to manage billions of data points at scale and process queries in just a few milliseconds, a graph database enables companies to make real-time decisioning in the moment a customer is engaged, or triggers a marketing signal.

As a cloud-based technology, they also ensure that the data and decisioning are as close to the customer as possible and that insights gained can be acted upon at high speed.

A route to agnostic identity management     

As well as having the right foundational technology, a marketing team needs to think about how it can make the transition and release its grip on cookies and device IDs, while still improving customer personalization. Broadly speaking, the teams we work with follow these steps:

Establish your goals. To get the most from your identity solution you need to have a clear idea about how you want to use identity in your advertising and marketing.  What signals do you your want to use to inform targeting, attribution or decisioning, for example, and how near to real-time does the system need to respond to achieve those goals?  It may well be different for each scenario.

Start with your own data. The best data any organisation should have access to about its customers is certainly its own.  Assessing the data you have - not only in terms of the signals available, but its quality - and how well connected it is across your different sales and marketing systems is the first step. 

You should also assess whether that data is timely. Will it be useful in real-time decisioning, and if so, is the architecture on which that data sits capable of supporting decisions at the speeds needed?  Use that data to build an identity graph which can be the heart of your identity management solution.

Fill the gaps with other sources. There will be data that you are missing that will help identify signals that you can use to better measure the effectiveness of marketing, or trigger certain activities such as a notification or offer, based on an individual’s behaviour or location. A combination of data co-op agreements, neutral third parties or syndicated providers may well be able to provide this information.

Make sure that any provider can not only provide the information you need, but that it is processed and accessible in the timescales required. Data might be available in real-time, but if that data is a week old because of when it is processed, it may not suit your need for a real-time decision.

Stitching it all together. Once you have the data sources, they need to be stitched together on a global scale to meet the decision-making speed needed for your use cases. Your customer could be anywhere in the world, and you must be able to make decisions in the moment they are engaged, so understanding those needs is critical.

If your existing architecture cannot support the speed you need to operationalise, then it doesn’t matter how good the data sources are, you will risk your business goals.

One bite at a time. Once a solution is chosen, don’t switch over in one swoop. Take your time, and look for incremental reach into your desired audiences or attributable brand lift with each change you make. 

There is no need to try and boil the ocean. Test and optimise by focusing on a specific application, channel, or type of campaign. This is an iterative process that may have an immediate impact but it will yield its best results as you understand the insights being delivered, and improve accuracy in areas relying on probabilistic analysis.

A key part of that process is learning to filter out the noise in your data, so that good data delivers strong insights and identifies signals.

Manage the move to better identity management

With the changing landscape of identity management, there are a bewildering number of data sources to choose from. But, at the end of the day, it will be the brands and publishers that can operationalise their own data that will win.  

It won’t be possible to work with a single external data provider and achieve the goals of most businesses, unless they operate in a highly specialised and narrow field.  Today, marketers need to accept the changing face of identity management and move now to ensure they can achieve their advertising and marketing goals in a world of deprecated cookies and device IDs, where identity management matters more than ever.

Daniel Landsman is Global Director of AdTech and Gaming at Aerospike

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com