Consumers engage with content and advertisements across various devices and platforms, making an identity framework essential for establishing effective connections. An identity framework allows businesses to identify consumers across multiple touchpoints, including the relationships among households, individuals, and their devices. Combined with a robust data framework, businesses can understand the relationship between households, individuals, and marketing attributes. Consequently, businesses can tailor and deliver personalized experiences based on individual preferences, ensuring seamless consumer interactions across their devices.
We spoke with industry leaders from Audigent, Choreograph, Goodway Group, MiQ, Snowflake, and others to gather insights on how innovations in data and identity are creating stronger consumer connections. Here are five key considerations for advertisers.
1. Embrace a multi-ID strategy
Relying on a single identity solution limits reach and adaptability. Recent data shows that both marketers and agencies are adopting multiple identity solutions. By embracing a multi-ID strategy with solutions like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2) and ID5, brands can build a resilient audience targeting and measurement foundation, ensuring campaigns remain effective as identity options evolve across channels.
A diversified identity approach ensures that advertisers are not left vulnerable to shifts in technology or policy. By utilizing multiple ID solutions, brands can maintain consistent reach and engagement across various platforms and devices, maximizing their campaign effectiveness.
“I don’t think it will ever be about finding that one winner…it’s going to be about finding the strengths and weaknesses and what solutions drive the best results for us.”
Stephani Estes, GroupM
2. Utilize AI and machine learning to enhance identity graphs
Identity graphs help marketers understand the connections between households, individuals, their identifiers, and devices. This understanding of customer identity ensures accurate targeting and measurement over time. AI and machine learning have become essential in making accurate inferences from less precise signals. These technologies strengthen the accuracy of probabilistic matches, allowing brands to understand consumer behavior more effectively even when data fidelity is lower.
Adopting a signal-agnostic approach and utilizing various ID providers enhances the ability to view consumers’ movements across platforms. This strategy moves measurement beyond isolated channels, providing a holistic understanding of campaign effectiveness and how different formats contribute to overall performance. By integrating AI and machine learning into identity graphs, advertisers can develop more cohesive and effective marketing strategies that guide customers seamlessly through their buying journey.
“What we’re finding is more and more identity providers are using Gen AI to locate connections of devices to an individual or household that maybe an identity graph would not identify.”
David Wells, Snowflake
3. Balance privacy with precision using AI
AI-driven probabilistic targeting and identity mapping provide effective solutions for privacy-focused advertising. Rather than relying on extensive personal data like cookies, AI can use limited, non-specific information to predict audience preferences accurately. This approach allows advertisers to reach their target audience while respecting privacy—a crucial balance as the industry shifts away from traditional tracking methods.
According to eMarketer, generative AI can further enhance audience segmentation through clustering algorithms and natural language processing. These tools enable more granular, privacy-compliant targeting, offering advertisers a pathway to reach audiences effectively without needing third-party cookies.
“I think the biggest opportunity for machine learning and AI is increasing the strength and accuracy of probabilistic matches. This allows us to preserve privacy by building models based on the features and patterns of the consumers we do know, instead of transmitting data across the ecosystem.”
Brian DeCicco, Choreograph
4. Activate real-time data for better engagement
Real-time data enrichment introduces dynamic audience insights into the bidding process, enabling advertisers to respond instantly to user actions and preferences. This agility empowers marketers to craft more relevant and impactful moments within each campaign.
“Real-time data enrichment–where data companies can have a real-time conversation with the bid stream–is an exciting part of the future, and I believe it will open the door to activating a wide variety of data sets.”
Drew Stein, Audigent
5. Create and deploy dynamic personas using AI
Generative AI transforms persona-building by providing advertisers with richer audience profiles for more precise targeting. This approach moves beyond traditional demographic categories, allowing for messaging that connects more meaningfully with each consumer.
By using generative AI to craft detailed personas, advertisers can move beyond generic messaging to create content that truly resonates on an individual level. This personalized approach captures attention and strengthens consumer relationships by addressing their specific needs and interests.
“One cool thing we’ve built recently is a Gen AI-based personas product that generates personas to create highly sophisticated targeting tactics for campaigns.”
Georgiana Haig, MiQ
Seize the future of data-driven engagement
Focusing on these five key innovations in data and identity allows you to adapt to the evolving media landscape and deliver personalized experiences to your audience.
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The Tapad Device GraphTM Had Twice the Precision and Three Times the Scale as Next Competitor New York, September 14, 2016 – Just-released findings of a Hotels.com® study revealed that Tapad’s (part of Experian) cross-screen marketing technology achieved the highest levels of precision and scale among competitors. According to the leading online accommodation booking website, after a rigorous, three-and-a-half month vendor analysis, Tapad achieved twice the precision of the next highest-scoring cross-screen offering and three times greater scale. The two other companies evaluated were not named. Said Helene Cameron-Heslop, Senior Manager of Analytics of the Hotels.com brand, “Our team implemented an extremely rigorous vetting of open, cross-screen technology vendors. At the outset, we assumed we would have to compromise on either scale or accuracy – particularly given the importance to our brand of operating in a privacy-safe setting. We were surprised to find a complete package, but Tapad’s Device Graph won out on scale, accuracy and privacy; making our choice of partners very clear.” In another metric critical to the Hotels.com brand, The Tapad Device GraphTM was eight times more “unique” than the next closest offering, meaning Tapad’s graph was found to have a much greater number of connections not seen in any of the other graphs. In addition to precision, uniqueness and scale, the Tapad Device GraphTM was found to have: ● 100% higher recall● 47% more incremental matches● 53% higher North American market coverage● 101% higher F-Score* “A valuable cross-device solution should enable partners to get everything they’re looking for from a single vendor,” said Tapad Founder and CEO, Are Traasdahl. “We are deeply impressed with how thorough Hotels.com was in their vetting, and we confidently tackle the complex challenges of the martech industry thanks to our superior technology. Everyone loves a bake-off, and Tapad is no exception – delivering best-in-class results in areas that really count.” *F-score is a statistical measurement that takes precision and recall together. The calculation is 2*(precision*recall)/precision + recall). It gives you one number instead of two numbers to look at and judge performance. Contact us today
As many folks within the email eco-system probably know by now, Spamhaus, an organization known for compiling several widely used anti-spam lists, has been extremely active this week. Over the past week, Spamhaus has listed a number of potentially hazardous IP addresses used by some of the world’s largest email service providers due to the way their newsletters signups are set up. According to most of the listings, Spamhaus has stated: Unfortunately, the said newsletter service is not verifying the email address of new subscribers. Due to this, the service can be easily abused to "listbomb" internet users. Problem resolution ============================ The newsletter service needs to clean up their email address list and ensure that bulk emails are only being sent to recipients who have verifiably subscribed to their bulk email service. In addition, the newsletter service should take appropriate actions to prevent further abuse of their service: a) Implementing CAPTCHA to prevent automated subscriptions b) Implementing Confirmed Opt In (COI) to prevent abusers from adding random email addresses to the newsletter service that are not owned by the subscriber For the most part these listings should not directly impact marketers’ current ability to send their campaigns and reach their customers as they are listed as “warnings” within the Spamhaus system. What is important to understand is that these types of listings will likely continue to happen as Spamhaus has seen a dramatic increase in malicious use of newsletter sign-ups to "email bomb" various addresses, especially government (.gov) domains. While we understand that implementing CAPTCHA, or COI into any marketing system is not something that can be done quickly, Experian Marketing Services has recommended that our clients begin to investigate how they can potentially implement this process into their newsletter sign-ups. By asking customers to simply perform the CAPTCHA check, it will not only protect marketers from adding addresses from automated signup systems, but will also reduce the possibility of being listed with Spamhaus for these types of issues in the future. Some additional resources: Massive Email Bombs Target .Gov Addresses Subscription bombing, ESPs and Spamhaus, August 15, 2016 by laura in Best Practices Comment on the latter blog post on WordtotheWise.com from the CEO of Spamhaus: Excellent well summarized article Laura. No, we’ve not changed SBL policy to require COI. It’s something we very strongly advise but we cannot make a requirement. We’ll have to consider it if list-bombing of this magnitude cannot be kept in check by list managers. This incident involved a large number of government addresses belonging to various countries being subscribed to very large numbers of lists in a very short space of time by scripts run by the attacker(s). Most of the lists hit by the attack used COI and therefore only sent confirmation requests and did not subscribe any addresses. The attack undoubtedly also hit lists which used Captcha in addition to COI and thus did not even proceed to COI (those list admins deserve some sort of community ‘hi 5’ award, since one can imagine how hard it is to convince one’s management to implement COI let alone put Captcha in front of it). The issue is the badly-run ‘open’ lists which happily subscribed every address without any consent verification and which now continue as participants in the list-bombing of government addresses. These we are trying to address with SBL listings to prompt resolution by the Senders. As you noticed, most of these particular incident listings are for IPs ending “.0/32” which does not cause any mail issue to the Sender and is deliberately used where we have a good relationship with the Sender and know they will act quickly on the alert. Steve Linford Chief Executive The Spamhaus Project