Overreliance on a single identity provider and the decline in the use of cookies have made identity management increasingly complex. Ad cookies have been used since the mid-2000s, but in 2020 Apple stopped tracking all third-party cookies, and Google Chrome announced it would end cookie tracking by 2024. This forced the industry to rethink long-used behavioral targeting strategies. The situation has been in flux for about the past three years. With Apple announcing ATT in 2021 and Google’s 2022 announcement about GAID going away, everyone has been racing for clarity, certainty, and direction.
Browsers are starting to deprecate third-party cookies and limiting their scope, duration, and distribution, forcing the industry to change. The heavy focus on privacy protections, and the different regulations worldwide, have spurred the ecosystem to use consent management platforms. From my lens, consent management platforms, now seen across publishers everywhere, enable the ecosystem to maintain heavily relied-upon, tried-and-true targeting mechanisms.
But, is it enough?
Another persistent challenge is the ability to tie together identity across all channels. Different channels have different identifiers, and dealing with identity resolution requires ongoing investment in data hygiene that requires agility and the ability to adapt to different identity solutions.
Building an Identity-Agnostic Business
Businesses must become identity agnostic, so advertisers can no longer rely on a single identity provider. The industry is moving toward cross-platform control, enabling media buyers/sellers to move between platforms to spend efficiently and maximize ad performance across the entire advertising ecosystem.
To set up for success, businesses need to view identity resolution as a part of their broader data strategy, with the first step likely being building a first-party identity graph.
Once first-party data is established, companies can look at other types of data spines or vendors to enhance and build more robust identity graphs—moving toward more probabilistic environments, if they so choose, to enable maximum reach.
Businesses also need to ensure that data quality is up to par. Identity data is surprisingly messy, with problems such as incomplete and inconsistent data, metadata issues, and commingled data upstream.
Some vendors help solve this as well.
Testing and optimization are also critical. Advertisers and marketers should pick an application, a channel, a campaign type, or a solution and test its performance in its infrastructure. Once optimized and proven successful, it can be expanded more broadly. The infrastructure should support real-time data ingestion so advertisers and marketers can quickly obtain and leverage data for decision-making, attribution, planning, and forecasting. While it may require the proper investment, combining all the data is crucial for making intelligent business decisions.
The Role of Identity Resolution
As technology advances and the advertising ecosystem expands, advertisers and marketers face increasing challenges in resolving user identities. Identity resolution, sometimes called hyper-personalization, is a complex process that requires stitching together multiple data types from various channels and devices to create a cohesive plan.
This enables media to be operationalized and tracked at scale to meet objectives. However, relying on a single identity provider is no longer viable with the emergence of multiple identity providers, data clean rooms, and first-, second-, third-, and zero-party data.
When leveraging identity for targeting or attribution across various channels, understanding the signals coming in from the open internet has become more difficult with the degradation of signals. But the ability to target and do attribution must be maintained for the ecosystem to deliver results. Facebook recently posted better-than-expected earnings, claiming that AI boosts monetization by 30–40%. Could AI be the silver bullet here? It’s likely a component, but it’s not going to get the ecosystem where it needs to go entirely.
Different types of identity resolution are needed to get the customer journey right. Determining lift in awareness vs. click-through vs. conversions may occur at different parts of the funnel, but all of it still requires identity, albeit with some nuances in approach. To do it well requires both good data and platforms to enable appropriate processing.
In conclusion, the challenges involved in identity resolution are numerous and cumbersome, with cookies and device IDs rapidly degrading. Overcoming these challenges requires advertisers and marketers to become identity agnostic and use multiple platforms while focusing on their first-party data. This evolutionary step will help them prepare for the identity resolution world that is blooming now.
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