It’s time to have a talk about the marketing industry’s current obsession with identifiers. After more than a decade of obsessive audience-based targeting, our industry has become spooked by the seemingly never-ending stream of news around new privacy regulations and deprecation of widely used identifiers, all of which have significant implications for how marketers target and attribute their ad dollars.
The concern is understandable. But the reaction— an almost-frantic search for new identifiers to replace old ones that are disappearing — is misguided.
Identifiers are transitory — and they always will be. No one knows exactly where this industry will be five to 10 years from now, so banking on specific platforms and identifiers as long-term plays right now is a fool’s errand. Identifiers are merely a mechanism through which we exchange data. What truly matters is not the identifiers themselves, but the data behind them —and the audiences defined by that data.
Moving Beyond Identifiers
The forthcoming (albeit much delayed) deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome has been a key accelerant in the quest for a more sustainable way of targeting and attribution, but it’s far from the only identifier that’s shifted (or will be shifting) beneath marketers in the coming years. Mobile ad identifiers (MAIDs) are rapidly becoming a marketing utility of the past as Apple and Google up-level privacy settings, and both hashed emails and IP addresses face their own challenges when it comes to future privacy regulations, platform policies and obfuscation efforts.
In other words, the identifiers of today won’t be the identifiers of tomorrow. And even the identifiers of tomorrow won’t be the identifiers of the day after tomorrow. While they play a vital role in connecting the dots within an organisation’s media plan, they must be handled and accounted for as the temporary resources they are.
So where does this leave marketers who are looking to build sustainable data-driven programs? Let’s take a look at what’s really going to set the stage for long-term success.
Time for testing. Today’s companies, particularly multinational organisations that operate across regions with widely varying regulations, must pursue multi-faceted approaches to data-driven marketing. They must be able to tailor their strategies, tactics and methodologies to national and regional privacy regulations and policies. At the same time, they still need a single enterprise source of truth when it comes to consumer data if they want to maximise results and learnings across the organisation.
Only in pursuing a variety of data-driven marketing approaches can organisations help ensure they’re able to pivot as the landscape shifts beneath them. That’s one of the reasons why testing programs should comprise a far bigger portion of brand budgets than they typically have in the past. Brands need to constantly be testing the various approaches to identity that are available to them at any given time to understand what performs, what’s duplicative to other efforts, and how a given view into audience identity can be replaced when needed.
Balancing deterministic and probabilistic. There’s a reason we’re hearing so much talk about first-party data these days. It’s one of the most reliable ways of ensuring a company can maintain a view of its customers even amid massive upheavals within the marketing datascape. Today’s enterprises should be investing in bringing as much first-party data into their folds as possible in order to build connective tissue among their efforts even in the absence of identifiers.
But they shouldn’t stop at first-party data. To achieve scale and enable new customer acquisition, companies must leverage third-party probabilistic data resources to extend the power of their deterministic data assets to privacy-compliant lookalike models and audience cohorts that can be used for prospecting purposes.
Seeking agnostic, flexible, interoperable solutions. Above all, today’s data-driven enterprises need to be building for flexibility and interoperability. By building data strategies and partnerships in an ID-agnostic way, organisations can ensure their audiences and insights are able to translate to new environments and platforms without loss of scale and fidelity.
The technologies and IDs companies feed into their data strategies should be interchangeable within their ecosystems, and this is an expectation that should be applied to any and all partnerships and solutions that touch a company’s data. Only in embracing change as the guiding constant of tomorrow’s data landscape can marketers truly expect to safeguard their strategies against an uncertain future.