Bridging disparate data in a fragmented world
In today’s world, consumers engage with brands across multiple platforms, including social media, online marketplaces, in-store experiences, and customer service touchpoints. However, the main challenge for marketers and advertisers is the fragmentation of customer data across these different channels. Each platform generates its own set of data, which is stored in different databases and formats. Integrating these various data sources to create a unified view of the customer is a complex task involving technology and understanding customer behavior across different digital and physical channels.
Businesses must link these data fragments to avoid creating a disconnected customer experience. For example, a person may browse products on a mobile app, ask questions through a customer service chat, and eventually purchase in an online marketplace. Traditional data analysis methods often need to recognize these activities as those of a single customer, which can result in missed opportunities to deliver personalized customer experiences across the customer journey.
Identity resolution: The key to a unified customer experience
Connecting online interactions across various platforms is a challenge for brands. Identity resolution enables enterprises to overcome this challenge by stitching together disparate signals and records to orchestrate experiences and analyze outcomes more effectively. By pairing Experian’s identity capabilities with AWS Clean Rooms, enterprises can securely collaborate with their partners to derive deeper insights without exposing sensitive underlying data sets.
This partnership between AWS and Experian enables effective matching between disparate data sets, bolstering privacy-enhanced media planning, insights, data enrichment, media activation, and measurement use cases. Depending on their distinct needs and existing identifiers, customers can use two specific offerings of Experian’s identity resolution solutions paired with AWS Clean Rooms.
Experian’s identity resolution products ensure a frictionless brand experience across various channels, enhancing the customer journey from start to finish. Brands can employ our adaptable identity resolution solutions to forge connections between contextual, behavioral, lifestyle, and purchase-based data sources, assembling comprehensive customer profiles. Use dependable digital data to make informed decisions and elevate consumer engagement. Advanced deterministic and probabilistic features, combined with data science and cutting-edge technology, work hand in hand to mitigate risk and uphold data privacy.
Such recognition enables a more comprehensive understanding of your clientele, fostering trust and amplifying campaign effectiveness by utilizing securely managed, standardized customer data. With this strategic approach, businesses can achieve their objectives regulatory-compliant.
The consumer perspective: Why consistency matters
Data fragmentation can lead to inconsistent experiences for consumers, which can be frustrating and erode brand trust. For instance, imagine receiving a promotional email for a product you already purchased through an app or being targeted for a product you decided against.
Consumers are increasingly tech-savvy and demand a seamless, integrated experience regardless of how they interact with a brand. They want to feel valued and recognized at every touchpoint and don’t care about the complexities of data analytics. As a result, brands face significant pressure to get identity resolution right.
Data security and privacy: A Fort Knox for your data
AWS Clean Rooms empowers their customers to establish a secure data clean room within minutes, facilitating collaboration with any other entity within AWS. This fosters the generation of unique insights regarding advertising campaigns, investment decisions, clinical research, and more. With AWS Clean Rooms, the need to store or maintain a separate copy of data outside the AWS environment for subsequent dispatch to another party for consumer insight analysis, marketing measurement, forecasting, or risk assessment becomes obsolete.
AWS Clean Rooms provides an expansive set of privacy-enhancing controls for clean rooms. This includes query controls, query output restrictions, and query logging that allows customers to tailor restrictions on the queries executed by each clean room participant. Moreover, AWS Clean Rooms include advanced cryptographic computing tools that maintain data encryption—even during query processing—to adhere to stringent data-handling policies. This process employs a client-side encryption tool—an SDK or command line interface (CLI)—that utilizes a shared secret key with other participants in an AWS Clean Rooms collaboration.
With a wealth of expertise in data privacy management, Experian enhances campaign effectiveness and fosters trust by managing standardized customer data securely. By using the identity graph, you can preserve a unique identity for each customer. This strategy enables you to comprehensively understand your clientele and reach your business objectives in a regulatory-compliant manner.
The future of data-driven marketing starts here
AWS customers can use AWS Clean Rooms to establish their own clean rooms in mere minutes, initiating the analysis of their collective data sets without sharing their underlying data with each other. Customers can use the AWS Management Console to choose their collaboration partners, select data sets, and configure participant restrictions. With AWS Clean Rooms, customers can effortlessly collaborate with hundreds of thousands of companies already using AWS without needing to move data out of AWS or upload it to a different platform. When running queries, AWS Clean Rooms accesses data in its original location and applies built-in, adaptable analysis rules to assist customers in maintaining control over their data.
Coupled with Experian’s trusted data privacy management and unique Experian ID, businesses can effectively manage customer data, secure partners’ communication, and achieve regulatory-compliance objectives. This combination allows companies to use data-backed insights to supercharge their marketing initiatives, resulting in more meaningful customer interactions, improved match rates, and business success.
About the authors
Kalyani Koppisetti, Principal Partner Solution Architect, AWS
Kalyani Koppisetti is a technology leader with over 25 years of experience in the Financial Services Industry. In her current role at AWS, Kalyani advises financial services partners on best-practice cloud architecture. Kalyani works closely with internal and external stakeholders to identify industry technical trends, develop strategies, and execute them to help Financial Services Industry partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS. Technical and Solution interests include Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Storage Virtualization and Data Protection.
Matt Miller, Business Development Principal, AWS
In his role as Business Development Principal at AWS, Matt drives customer and partner adoption for the AWS Clean Rooms service specializing in advertising and marketing industry use cases. Matt believes in the primacy of privacy-enhanced data collaboration and interoperability underpinning data-driven marketing imperatives from customer experience to addressable advertising. Prior to AWS, Matt led strategy and go-to-market efforts for ad technologies, large agencies, and consumer data products purpose-built to inform smarter marketing and deliver better customer experiences.
Tyler Middleton, Sr. Partner Marketing Manager, Experian Marketing Services
Tyler Middleton is the Partner Marketing Lead at Experian. With almost 20 years of strategic marketing experience, Tyler’s focus is on creating marketing strategies that effectively promote the unique value propositions of each of our partners’ brands. Tyler helps our strategic partners communicate their mutual value proposition and find opportunities to stand out in the AdTech industry. Tyler is an alumnus of the Seattle University MBA program and enjoys finding new marketing pathways for our growing partner portfolio.
Latest posts
The concept of identity resolution has emerged over the years as a strategic imperative among marketers and technology vendors. A report by Forrester contends that accurately establishing and maintaining customer identity is one of the most perplexing challenges facing marketers today. Customers have footprints in the offline and online worlds and tend to seamlessly transition across various channels and devices – presenting a unique challenge to truly understand who they are. But the ability to stitch these disparate components of information together means marketers can make better decisions and have more meaningful interactions with their customers. And for customers, this means an experience with personalized advertising content more likely to resonate with them. Why should marketers prioritize identity? The ability to accurately identify customers is the most basic prerequisite for marketing analytics, orchestration and execution. As such, it is becoming increasingly important for brands and marketers planning to link together disparate systems of audience insights and engagement to foster a more seamless and personalized omnichannel customer experience. For example, if an advertiser can identify a customer’s interests, as well as how that person prefers to consume information, then the advertiser can create and deliver messaging that will resonate with the customer. However, like most competitive differentiators, the mission critical components to accurately determine an identity reside within the suite of identity management tools at the marketers’ disposal and the expertise required for proper execution – a struggle for most marketers. But when properly implemented, a comprehensive customer identity strategy can be among a brand or marketer’s most valuable and proprietary assets. Where to begin with identity resolution? With the convergence of CRM platform data, cross-channel online touchpoints, offline record linkage management, probabilistic cross-device graphs, and data onboarding—evolving from point solutions to unified platforms—marketers are faced with an increasingly complex set of challenges in addressing and solving for customer identity management. To properly implement from the get go, and to avoid having to bolt on disparate technologies down the road, emerging industry trends and success stories suggest marketers need a neutral technology service provider that can provide each of these solutions via a single, unified platform. A vendor that can build a solid identity management foundation comprised of omni-channel targeting and attribution, cross-device resolution, online-offline linkage management, and data onboarding form the nexus of a cohesive identity strategy, built to last. Experian helps connect consumer identity As a trusted name in data and information services for more than 40 years, we are committed to privacy by design and the responsible usage and security of data. Whether you’re a brand, agency, or publisher, Experian has the wide-ranging toolset to help you put people at the heart of your business and make better marketing decisions. By harnessing the power of the sum of these parts, fusing both offline and online identifiers and attributes, Experian has established a leadership position in identity management. If you're ready to begin building your identity foundation, contact us and get started today! Learn more about why identity matters to marketers and consumers, here!
Partnership Yields Increased Match and Connectivity Rate Through Tapad Graph, acquired by Experian March 27, 2018 — New York, N.Y. — Tapad, part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer and today announced the impactful results of its strategic partnership with Flashtalking, the leading global independent platform for ad delivery, unification and insights. Flashtalking is one of Tapad's most engaged partners, using the Tapad Graph to unify cross-device engagement and identity-driven consumer behaviors for attribution modeling. The company leverages a unique identifier that, in conjunction with Tapad's Graph, provides robust multi-touch attribution solution for its clients. This partnership has resulted in above-industry match and bridge rates for Flashtalking and its customers. Overall, the Tapad Graph yielded a 71 percent match rate with 41 percent of converters engaging on multiple devices, highlighting the importance of cross-device measurement. Tapad’s identity solutions provide Flashtalking with a more holistic view of global engagement. Flashtalking marries ad server log file data with the Tapad Graph to connect all interactions in the consumer journey. This enables Flashtalking to provide more accurate and impactful cross-device attribution, which ultimately enables better optimization. These achievements have led to recognition of Tapad and Flashtalking’s work by the I-COM Global Forum for Marketing, Data and Measurement. “Tapad allows us to understand user engagement across devices and platforms at both the household or individual user level, which is extremely beneficial when providing marketers with true path to conversion and attribution,” said Steve Latham, global head of analytics at Flashtalking. “Since our relationship began, we’ve successfully leveraged Tapad data to provide more accurate, actionable insights that have helped numerous brands achieve substantial gains in media effectiveness.” Flashtalking client Michael Lamontagne, SVP of analytics and CRM at 22squared says “We are big believers in using cross-device insights to improve our campaigns. Flashtalking has been a strategic partner in the pursuit of that goal. By incorporating the Tapad Graph, Flashtalking delivers powerful insights into user engagement and media attribution across browsers and devices. Of equal importance, their bundled solution makes it easy and efficient, saving our team countless hours of busy work.” “Our ongoing work with Flashtalking has had a significant impact on the accomplishments we’ve achieved,” said Chris Feo, SVP, strategy & global partnerships at Tapad. “Being able to grow with a dedicated partner that leverages our proprietary technology in unique ways has helped us uncover the global impact our services can have on a business. We’re proud to drive success for Flashtalking’s clients on a global scale.” Contact us today
Digital Marketing Challenges Are you new to digital marketing? If you answered yes, then you may already know this is a complex world made up of cookies, pixels, attribution, and unique KPIs. With nearly 10 years of advertising experience, Experian is familiar with the challenges advertisers face as they prepare for their first digital marketing campaign. Those challenges include: determining a target audience, justifying data fees for targeting, sending a consistent message to every channel and measuring the success of a campaign. Of these challenges, creating an accurate, data-driven target audience and understanding the attribution process are the two most common. Coincidentally, these two challenges tend to be the most difficult to overcome and have the highest impact on a campaign’s success. 1.) Creating an accurate, data-driven target audience Understanding the basic demographics of your customer is the first step in the audience creation process. Your next step should be to understand your customers’ lifestyles, purchase behaviors, and current interests. By truly knowing your customer, you are then able to build out a multi-channel targeting strategy comprehensive of not only basic demographics and past behavioral data, but current behavioral trends that lead to individuals who are in market for a product or service. This reduces irrelevant marketing to individuals who may have the demographic characteristics, but are not yet in market. Overall, creating a relevant target audience saves media spend by focusing on targeting tactics that have a higher potential for success. 2.) Understanding the attribution process Now that you have your target audience, you need to determine how to measure the success of your campaign. Is your goal to increase online purchases? Drive store visits? Or, do you want your overall revenue to grow by a certain amount? Before launching your campaign, make sure you have a clear goal as well as a plan for measuring whether or not you meet your goal. Most digital marketers will judge the success of a campaign by online events, such as site visits, form completions, or online purchases. However, you may also want to measure offline metrics like phone calls or in person visits to a brick and mortar store. Offline metrics are essential to campaign performance, but are frequently over looked. Experian’s OmniActivation Strategic Services recommends having one clear goal that can be accurately measured. This ensures your campaign’s target audience and optimizations support the metric that will ultimately determine the success of your campaign.