I am terrible with names. I can remember the most random, disassociated information about people – their partner’s college, the shirt they were wearing when we last met, what type of laptop they had – but rarely does this information help me remember a person’s name. It can be embarrassing, but it can also really be frustrating. I am often sure I know the person, but I can’t initiate or resume an appropriate and familiar conversation unless I can show I really know who he or she is.
Why do I have this challenge? Because like many of us, and many marketers, I am inundated with information. Much of it is not necessarily useful. Other bits of information, while useful, are hard to parse into meaningful categories to help solve identity. For a marketer, website visitors, both known and unknown, ad viewers, and engagers can all look different depending on the medium, device, and even geography.
Like me, many advertisers see people they know they should know, but they can’t connect the dots to meaningfully continue their conversation. I am lucky – I can solve my problem with additional focus and attention, as well as some mnemonic tricks I’ve learned such as saying the person’s name four times when I first learn it. And thankfully my friends and family have better memories and will often help me out, casually saying a name when I get that panicked look on my face.
But marketers have additional challenges. Often, they aren’t provided a name when they first “meet” someone. Many people expect both a degree of anonymity on the web but also want custom experiences. Marketers then must often identify a customer by stitching together disparate clues, from different touchpoints and differing periods. Usually, this information comes from an ever-increasing number of systems not necessarily designed to work together. And all these signals arrive within a varied landscape of privacy regulations and evolving best practices. Often too, just because you can identify someone doesn’t mean you should.
Oh, it gets better: To make matters even more difficult, there are significant upcoming changes to the internet. Cookies and mobile identifiers will no longer be available, or at a minimum will be usable only in limited ways. While several new alternative solutions are being offered and discussed, marketers still don’t know what will be available, accepted by walled gardens, and even legal this time next year.So what to do? First, focus on fixing what you can fix. Talk to Acxiom about using Acxiom Real ID™ to resolve identity on your terms. Acxiom has always been aligned with marketers while being responsible to the people. We have a long history of advising and implementing solutions for marketers that allow them to utilize the technology and best practices available in the market, while doing so both ethically and following data governance regulations. Our identity products are the evolution of our customer-centric, people-protective stance. Reach out to [email protected] for more information.
