Originally appeared on MarTech Series
Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today’s complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers.
We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever.
This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer.
Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed.
2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs
Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet.
The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising.
This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach.
2015-2020: The age of walled gardens
From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments.
However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms.
The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web.
2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy
By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking.
Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments.
Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape.
With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer.
2025: The omnichannel imperative
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up.
The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable.
Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape.
Adapting to the future of identity
The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind.
The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant.
Latest posts
Data may not be the most glamorous aspect of marketing but it is at the heart creating meaningful consumer interactions in today’s data-driven world. In our award-winning, annual Digital Marketer Report we asked senior leaders about their top challenges and priorities. They said things like standing out against competitors, creating relevant interactions and customer acquisition. To my surprise, they didn’t say data. However, all the top challenges and priorities are predicated on having accurate, enriched data that is linked together in a central location for a complete customer view. The sobering fact is that most brands are not there yet. Most are not fully utilizing their data assets and maximizing their marketing intelligence. Take a look at these stats from the Digital Marketer Report to get an idea of where most brands are with data management practices. Overall, 45% of companies collect data via mobile – be it a mobile website, app or both TWEET THIS! 97% of companies suffer from common data errors. 61% of companies named human error as a top reason for data inaccuracies. TWEET THIS! On average globally, companies believe that 23% of their budget is wasted annually due to poor data quality. TWEET THIS! Today, only 35% of companies manage their data centrally through a single director. TWEET THIS! 99% of companies believe achieving a single customer view is important to their business. Only 24% of companies say they have a single customer view today. TWEET THIS! 29% of marketers who enrich their data with third-party data only add one type of data. TWEET THIS! One-quarter of marketers don’t enrich their data with any kind of third-party data. TWEET THIS! It’s important for marketing leaders to understand that they first need to focus on data and creating a customer-centric organization to support good data-management practices. Only then will they be able to reach their goals.
To say that Amazon Prime Day was a raging success is a considerable understatement Prime Day, the manufactured holiday by Amazon.com to mark the site’s 20th anniversary on July 15, 2015, was the biggest day of the past year for Amazon.com…by far. Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise® online intelligence tool reports that Amazon.com garnered over 83.3 million visits from mobile and desktop browsers on Prime Day. By comparison, Prime Day topped Cyber Monday — the previous record holder — by a staggering 51.5 percent and Black Friday by 77.2 percent. It’s actually a bit ironic that Amazon promoted Prime Day as having more deals that Black Friday. That’s because visits to Amazon.com have actually been growing so steadily that last year’s Black Friday isn’t even among the site’s 10 biggest traffic days of the last 12 months. Nearly half of the days in July this year, in fact, have had visit counts that surpassed Black Friday. Compared to the previous Wednesday (July 8), the number of visits to Amazon.com on Prime Day rose 68 percent. But Amazon wasn’t the only retailer celebrating. Prime Day was definitely more of a “a rising tide lifts all boats” kind of event. For instance, 57 of the top 100 retail sites in the Hitwise 500 also saw increased visits on July 15 compared to the Wednesday prior. Walmart and Best Buy, which offered competing deals, had a an especially strong showing on Prime Day with visits to their sites up 97 percent and 44 percent, respectively, over the previous Wednesday. Search on Amazon Prime Day So what deals were consumers flocking to Amazon.com to take advantage of? To find out, I used Hitwise to compare the search terms leading to Amazon on Prime Day compared to the previous Wednesday. No surprise, many of the products that had the greatest increase in search click share week-over-week were Amazon’s own, including the “Amazon Fire Stick” (+417 percent) and “echo” (+357 percent). But also on the list were other products that were part of Amazon’s celebratory deals, such as “Nexus 6” (+352 percent), “Instant Pot” (+271 percent) and “PS4” (+250 percent). Overall, searches for Amazon Prime Day and variations thereof were common on July 15 and Amazon.com received 59.8 percent of search clicks from “Amazon Prime Day” searches, 61.2 percent of which were paid, meaning Amazon invested heavily in making sure that it successfully captured the traffic of interested consumers. But obviously not all Prime Day searches lead to the retail giant. Media sites Wired, CNNMoney.com and NBC News each captured at least three percent of traffic following a Prime Day search. In fact, seven of the top 10 winners of “Amazon Prime Day” searches were news and media outlets, which largely did not invest in paid search for that term. Walmart, which captured 1.5 percent of “Amazon Prime Day” searches, however, did pay. Among the “Amazon Prime Day” search clicks that lead to Walmart.com, 63.6 percent were paid. Of course two can play at that game. Amazon was also busy buying search terms of competitors on Prime Day. For instance, 23.9 percent of the clicks to Amazon from searches for “Target” were paid as were 15.9 percent of “Newegg” search clicks, eight percent of search clicks from “Best Buy” searches and 2.5 percent of search clicks for “Walmart.” Sources of traffic In terms of sources of traffic to Amazon.com, News and Media sites accounted for a 56 percent greater share of upstream traffic on Prime Day (6.7 percent) than the previous Wednesday (4.3 percent). But media weren’t the only ones talking about Prime Day, consumers, too, were taking to social media to chat up the event. And while not all online chatter was positive, Social Media sites delivered 15.2 percent of all referred traffic to Amazon.com on Prime Day, up from 11.3 percent of traffic the Wednesday prior, a relative increase of 35 percent. Despite the fact that Prime Day was meant to celebrate a milestone anniversary for Amazon, the overwhelming success for Amazon and other retailers will likely make it an annual event. If that is indeed the case, consumers will come to anticipate the day much like they do Black Friday. Marketers shouldn’t discount the potential for an annual Prime Day event to disrupt normal consumer spending patterns as well as drive even more dollars to be spent through online channels. For more information on how you can leverage Hitwise, the world’s largest sample of online consumer behavior, to improve the effectiveness of your search, display, affiliate, mobile, email and social media marketing campaigns, click here.
Pat Pellegrini is General Manager for Experian Marketing Services’ Consumer Insights group in North America. He also serves as Chief Research Officer and strongly supports the important role that high quality measurement science plays in driving deeper, more actionable consumer understanding. Every year, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) holds its annual conference where research professionals gather to discuss the latest trends, innovations and research. As a leading provider of consumer insights, Experian Marketing Services has an important role to play within AAPOR, the top professional organization of public opinion and survey research professionals. Since joining Experian as Chief Research Officer, and now as General Manager of Consumer Insights, I have driven our organization — already known for our trusted consumer insights — to move even more aggressively on innovations in measurement science, whether that is through self-reported consumer surveys like our Simmons National Consumer Study or passive data collection like our Hitwise online intelligence data. Consumers are being profoundly affected by rapid changes in technology and we are committed to being at the forefront in developing new research approaches to ensure that our data accurately and reliably reflects consumer decisions, behaviors, attitudes, lifestyles and media preferences. Experian Marketing Services was well represented at this year’s AAPOR conference both among attendees and presenters. In fact, six exciting topics from Experian were presented at the conference based on the work we do here every single day. Having this level of recognition from our research peers and the AAPOR organization is an outstanding accomplishment that speaks to our commitment toward research quality and innovation. It’s these types of insights that will help propel the industry forward. At the conference, I was delighted to present, along with my colleague Gerry Dirksz, findings from a successful initiative that Experian Marketing Services recently undertook to produce higher response rates to our Simmons National Consumer Study. Declining response rates are an obstacle facing nearly every player in our field and one that has real implications on data quality. Because certain key segments of the population (e.g., Millennials, Hispanics, etc.) are disproportionately less likely to respond to or participate in research studies, marketers and others who rely on such research may be handicapped by potential blind spots in the resulting data which prevent them from fully understanding important consumer audiences. To prevent such blind spots from occurring in our data, we tested a new two-phased dynamic incentive program that took into consideration an individual household or specific respondent’s propensity to fall into certain “hard-to-reach” segments. With this information in hand, we were able to offer different (often higher) incentives to “hard-to-reach” respondents from the start in order to improve response rates of those segments. Compared to control groups, response rates among those whose incentives were determined by the dynamic model were significantly higher. Having now rolled out this successful process for our entire sample frame, we have seen overall response rates improve markedly. While Experian is not alone in testing new initiatives like these, we are most definitely pioneers in the space and are setting an example for others to follow now that we have demonstrated results. In this regard, I look forward to blazing new trails based on well-thought hypotheses from our expert team. This will ensure that our data continues to be the gold-standard for helping our clients better understand consumers so that they can create more relevant and engaging interactions. Other topics presented by Experian at AAPOR include: The effects of total navigational burden, length of instrument and page complexity on item non-response This paper examined item non-response for long surveys which is a major topic of concern for survey researchers, particularly those looking to collect a large number of measurements from a single source. Specifically, binary (yes/no) questions were studied and potential factors that might contribute to item non-response were identified for further exploration. Patterns of response and non-response to sexual orientation measures In this presentation, relationships and patterns of item non-response among non-Hispanics to a measure of sexual orientation contained within the Simmons National Consumer Survey were explored. Since 2009, item non-response to the sexual orientation question has declined by a rate of 26 percent with a decline among 18-34 year-old respondents of 43 percent. U.S. Hispanic receptivity to self-reported measure of sexual orientation This paper examined the effects of adding a question on sexual orientation with respect to mail survey instrument return rates and item non-response rates among the U.S. Hispanic population. A key finding from this research was the pronounced, significant difference in item non-response rates which were disproportionately higher for Hispanics compared to non-Hispanics and significantly higher for Spanish-language Hispanics versus English-language Hispanics. Does providing an email address in an initial contact study indicate respondents will be cooperators in a subsequent online panel study? This study examines how the cooperation rate for a future study differs between individuals who are willing to provide an email address in the initial phase and those who are not. Results indicate that respondents who provide an email address in the initial contact study are more cooperative in joining a subsequent online panel than those who do not provide an email address. Patterns of non-response to health, diet, nutrition and apparel measures conditioned on body mass index This study examines the relative response of overweight or obese individuals to questions concerning diet, nutrition, health and even apparel in comparison to those individuals classified in the normal range for BMI. Based on our findings, a BMI measurement, outside of the normal range, would not negatively impact a study’s non-response rate to other survey questions related to one’s self-image. For more information about these presentations, please contact us at consumerinsight@experian.com.