Originally appeared on MediaPost
As the digital ecosystem becomes more complex, managing multiple identifiers for consumers has emerged as a significant challenge. From cookies and IP addresses to mobile IDs and universal IDs, marketers and platforms face increasing difficulty in maintaining a unified view of their consumers. Without a coherent identity strategy, campaigns can suffer from poor targeting, limited personalization, and flawed attribution.
Experian understands these challenges and offers solutions to help our partners navigate the complexities of a multi-ID landscape. By utilizing both digital and offline data, we provide the tools to unify fragmented identifiers and maintain a persistent view of consumers. As a result, marketers and platforms get rich insights, accurate cross-device targeting, improved addressability, and measurable advertising.
The shifting identity landscape
For years, the industry has relied on cookies to identify consumers across devices and platforms. However, with ongoing signal loss, including the uncertainty around cookies, and the evolution of privacy regulations, the digital identity landscape has grown more complicated. As consumers hop from one device to another, they are now represented by multiple signals, each tied to a different aspect of their digital behavior.
While this shift brings complexity, it also opens the door for innovation. Marketers and ad platforms now have the opportunity to rethink their identity strategies and adopt more flexible approaches that are not reliant on a single identifier.
This is where Experian comes in.
Connecting the dots: A holistic view of the customer journey
Our identity solutions are designed to help manage today’s multi-ID ecosystem by connecting digital and offline identifiers to a single customer profile. This creates a unified view of the consumer, and when combined with our understanding of customer behavior (e.g. demo, interests, shopping patterns) marketers and platforms get both insights about their customers and the addressability to reach them across channels.
Four examples of what you can do with a strong identity foundation
- If an advertiser wants to make its first-party data more addressable, it can utilize our Digital Graph with universal IDs, hashed emails (HEMs), and connected TV (CTV) IDs to extend its reach.
- A publisher who wants to gain further insights into their audiences and create private marketplaces (PMPs) can achieve this goal with the use of our Digital Graph with hashed emails, universal IDs, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), CTV IDs, and IPs. The publisher can use this in concert with Marketing Attributes to understand age, gender, household income, buying behavior, and more. The publisher can connect marketing attributes to the Digital Graph via our Living Unit ID (LUID) to understand more about consumers that fall into their segments.
- A demand-side platform (DSP) who wants to extend first-party and third-party audience reach across all digital devices on their platform will use the Digital Graph with all digital IDs to allow users of their platform to select cross-device extension against first-party and third-party audiences.
- A retail media network (RMN) can use our Offline and Digital Graphs to connect in-store and online purchases to a household profile—even when purchases are made by different people. The RMN can then reach that household across digital media platforms and accurately attribute the in-store purchase back to digital ad exposure.
Identity as a strategic asset: Today and in the future
In our paradoxical world where consumers are represented by multiple identifiers, yet marketers and platforms face signal loss, identity is more than a technical issue—it’s a strategic asset. The ability to unify identity data into a single profile provides marketers with the customer intelligence needed to drive growth and stay competitive. Here’s how we do it:
- Deep, persistent customer understanding: With roots in offline, deterministic data like names, addresses, and emails, we provide an accurate and persistent view of identity to our customers. This allows you to maintain a consistent and comprehensive understanding of your customers and their marketing attributes over time.
- Highly accurate and refreshed digital identities: Our signal-agnostic graph is not reliant on any one signal as it includes HEMs, cookies, MAIDs, IPs, Universal IDs, and CTV IDs. Our Digital Graph is updated weekly, ensuring the data is always fresh and addressable. This persistent linkage of individuals and households to their identifiers and devices means your campaigns are always targeting the right people.
- Connected offline and digital graphs for holistic insights: We connect offline and digital identities by following privacy-first best practices, such as preventing re-identification, to allow insights from the offline world to be used in the online world. This integrated approach, enriched with marketing data, gives you better insights, more addressable advertising, and the ability to engage customers across multiple devices while accurately measuring campaign impact.
Transform challenges into opportunities
The rise of the multi-ID landscape presents both challenges and opportunities for the advertising industry. We stand as the trusted partner to navigate this complexity, utilizing insights from the offline world to inform decisions in the online world, enabling personalized marketing and accurate attribution, and helping you achieve your current and future goals.
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It’s almost that time of the year again, the time to put away fourth of July merchandise and replace it with this year's favorite superhero backpacks. It’s almost back-to-school season, and parents and kids from kindergarten to college are preparing for school's "new normal." To navigate the challenge of 2021, Experian’s Marketing Analytics team is sharing Back-to-School shopping season insights with you. Download the eBook to learn more. Our outlook about this year's Back-to-School shopping season can help you better plan and improve your marketing effectiveness. The report covers who's actively shopping for school supplies, whether they're shopping in-person or online, and what they're buying this year. Here's a summary of what you'll learn in the report: Who (specifically) is shopping for back-to-school supplies this year? More than half of online searches related to Back-to-School were made by a small set of consumer segments. We’ve identified 4 Mosaic® groups as being in-market for back-to-school merchandise. To find these types of consumers, we used online behavioral data and filtered for households with school-age children between 5 and 15 years old. Each group, such as Flourishing Families, share similar shopping behaviors and needs. While each group of consumers has a need for Back-to-School merchandise, they have different circumstances that require more personalized marketing. Let's break down each Mosaic® group to better understand their size and key features so that you can build more personalized messaging. Contact us for segments and insights specific to your brand. Power Elite As you can see in our Mosaic® product brochure, Power Elite is categorized as Group A. This is the largest group analyzed in the report, accounting for 4.5 million U.S. households. Here are the Power Elite consumer types actively shopping for back-to-school merchandise this year: A01: American Royalty A03: Kids and Cabernet A04: Picture Perfect Families Key Features: Wealthy Highly Educated Politically conservative Purchase housewares and electronics in store Vacation and fitness retail influencers Luxury lease cars Flourishing Families Also called Group B in this report, Flourishing Families is comprised of 3.7 million U.S. households. Active consumer types: B07: Across the Ages B08: Babies and Bliss B09: Family Fun-tastic Key Features: Affluent Charitable contributors Athletic activities High-priced children’s clothing Home products & furnishings Sporting good Suburban Style Suburban Style, also Group D, is made up of 2.9 million U.S. households. Active consumer types: D15: Sport Utility Families D16: Settled in Suburbia Key Features: Comfortable lifestyle Ethnically diverse Politically diverse Instagrammers Children’s games Wholesale members Family Union The Family Union group, Group I, is the smallest of those analyzed in this report, but still a respectable size: 1.2 million U.S. households. Active consumer types: I31: Hard Working Values Key Features: Bilingual Married with kids Large households Hunting clothing Automotive tools Will they shop online or in stores? Prepare for a return to in-store shopping as the US moves post-pandemic. These consumers have shopped in-store for Back-to-School and have trended toward in-store shopping as the vaccine was distributed. Mobile location data shows these consumers actively shopped in-person during the 2019 Back-to-School season, and are shopping in-person again post-pandemic. Experian analyzed consumer mobile location data for big box retailers, department stores, malls and apparel-accessory stores since June 2019. The aggregated number of visits was indexed each month against 12-month average of that respective year. An index higher than 100 indicates shopping behavior that month was higher than the average of that year. An index less than 100 indicates shopping behavior that month was less than the average of that year. Planning store layouts and inventory will be more important this year for marketers as consumers return to the stores for Back-to-School shopping needs. What will they buy? Plan for Back-to-School product composition to be like pre-pandemic while you plan your inventory. Keep an eye on local outbreak risk which dictates whether school districts will pivot to remote learning. Product composition during the 2020 Back-to-School season was skewed away from apparel and towards virtual learning materials, such as home office supplies and technology, but should revert to pre-pandemic behaviors. Using ConsumerViewTM Transactional data, we compared consumer product composition during the 2019 and 2020 back-to-school shopping seasons. Children’s Apparel and Accessories: share was smaller in 2020, and was a more dramatic impact for Groups A, B, and D. Books: Groups B and D saw an increased share in 2020, but Groups A and I saw little change. Home Office: share was greater in 2020 for all groups, particularly Group A. Computers: share was greater in 2020 for all segments, particularly Group I Want to learn more? Improve your marketing ROI and grow your business during back-to-school season using Experian’s new Discovery Platform. No sign-up required: watch the demo to learn how retailers like you can use The Discovery Platform™ to track online versus in-store shopping and safely navigate evolving back-to-school consumer behaviors.
Third-party cookies have been a crucial component in people-based advertising and digital identity. With Google's recent announcement of delaying third-party cookie deprecation to 2024, the industry has more time to rethink how to effectively identify and communicate with consumers when the time comes. Preparing for cookie deprecation Solving for the post-cookie world is mission critical, particularly as consumer expectation for a relevant digital experience is heightened. We’ve seen a number of industry participants, including brands, publishers, data providers and technology platforms, work around the clock to find an alternative to third-party cookies—one that amasses the same scale and reach but also maintains consumer privacy. In fact, industry insights echo that sentiment. According to a white paper from Winterberry Group, Collaborative Data Solutions: The Evolution of Identity in a Privacy-First, Post-Cookie World, sponsored in part by Experian, one of the most frequently heard comments was the urgency for the industry to develop post-cookie, privacy compliant solutions that work in a more integrated manner. And if there was one overarching position regarding the research into the future of identity, it’s that collaboration is key. Participants in the white paper expressed that with the elimination of third-party cookies, there will be a surge in collaborative solutions across and within companies to accommodate changes in the digital marketplace. Collaborative data solutions must move beyond new post-cookie identity replacements and encompass more holistic approaches, including first-party data. First-party data sharing Currently, 64.3 percent of organizations in the US collaborate with other organizations to share first-party data for insights, activation, measurement or attribution, and 16.7 percent in the U.S. have plans to. Virtually all US companies surveyed were aware of the option to collaborate with other organizations and expressed openness to discussions around sharing first-party data. What is the solution to third-party cookie deprecation? The deprecation of third-party cookies is creating a shock in the marketing and advertising world because there has been an over-dependence on one type of identifier. Therefore, the solution to identify consumers across the digital ecosystem will not come from a single replacement for third-party cookies. Instead, it will rely on a combination of solutions, including collaborative data between organizations and implementation of proprietary first-party data strategies, as well as a framework that can connect all these touchpoints together. Experian can help you navigate the cookieless future Experian is focused on building a more effective advertising ecosystem that promotes the interoperability of digital touchpoints while enabling and fostering new innovations in a privacy forward way. Contact us today and get started with building connected identity in the ever-changing data landscape. To learn more, watch the recording of our webinar with The Vitamin Shoppe where we discuss identity and how you can drive more addressable audience strategies amidst diminishing data signals.
As today’s digital landscape gets more and more complicated there are more ways for brands to connect with users and drive purchases and more ways for ad tech to target and measure those touch points. As in-person shopping picks up steam due to the re-normalization of society post-COVID 19; the connection between digital ads and in-person purchases needs to be made once again. With the rise of Connected TV throughout the pandemic there are even more digital opportunities to target a user. But how do you make sure that those brand engagements are captured and correctly attributed to offline purchases and conversions? The answer lies in a holistic identity resolution strategy. Cross-device identity resolution with The Tapad Graph connects the identifiers and devices of individuals within a household to each other; enabling targeting, frequency capping, extension, segmentation and measurement or attribution between devices; including Connected TV and hashed (privacy-protected) email addresses along with Cookies, Mobile Ad Ids and IP Address. Brands can join their first-party data to The Tapad Graph to execute strategies that connect online and offline data for pre, mid and post-campaign efficiencies. Let’s imagine a scenario in which an outdoor retail brand is targeting users watching specific content on a Connected TV device. Powered by identity resolution, they start with a general ad on CTV and continue targeting down individual paths with each user. When one of them converts in store and makes a purchase; the outdoor retailer can connect that action through location and in-store traffic data with the cross-device identity resolution used to execute the digital campaign. Now the actions of the user online and offline are resolved for more accurate measurement and attribution after the campaign ends. But it doesn’t stop there– the brand's CRM data can be reactivated for the next digital campaign and leveraged to capitalize on the most effective media mix for the user who made the purchase previously. These combined insights can be invaluable in shaping up future campaign strategies with geo-contextual ads, recommended additional products and personalization to help drive more conversions and purchases in-store or online. As in-person shopping picks back up and marketers are tasked once again with balancing online and in-store KPIs, the right identity resolution strategy can unlock necessary efficiencies for retailers, ad tech vendors and agencies tasked with supporting these initiatives. Get started with The Tapad Graph For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!