This article was originally published by The Drum.

As brands press on with their post-cookie strategies, Kyle Hollaway, senior vice president and head of global identity at Acxiom, explores the future of identity. With a technological convergence opening up exciting new opportunities across the industry, he explains how brands can reach people – not proxies – with far greater precision.

In the weeks since Google announced it won’t deprecate cookies after all, it’s been gratifying to see how brands have barely missed a beat. “As you were” seems to be the prevailing attitude across the industry, with businesses moving forward with their plans to wean themselves off third-party cookies.

And there’s a very good reason for that.

Third-party cookies were only ever a proxy for people – and a highly inaccurate and ineffective proxy at that. Now, with advances in identity meaning brands can actually connect with real people, on premium platforms, there’s absolutely no incentive for them to return to depending on cookies, even if that mechanism is technically still functioning.

Identity is entering a new era. Whether it’s retailers creating seamless customer journeys or financial services providers delivering tailored offers, brands are increasingly confident about who they’re connecting with, which opens up exciting new possibilities.

So what’s driving this change, what does it mean for brands, and what do they need to do to take full advantage of it?

A timely tech convergence

To some extent, we should probably thank Google for the cookie dance. While quite frustrating, it did at least accelerate the development and adoption of some key technologies that were already in the works. A timely convergence of cloud, data clean room, and identity-related technologies is enabling a new and more effective approach to connecting with people.

There’s been an overall shift toward brands using their first-party data to connect directly with downstream platforms and partners. This is enabled by data clean room technologies that sit on top of cloud hyperscalers. This combination allows data to be shared, in a privacy-compliant manner, without having to move it around the ecosystem. The ability to get a people-based match without the risk associated with sharing files across the internet is attractive to the entire industry.

But cloud-hosted data clean rooms alone don’t provide a complete solution, because there still needs to be a match between data sets. The matching methods employed in data clean rooms were historically quite elementary, using predetermined hard keys like hashed email addresses, which limited scale. But now identity providers are provisioning these clean rooms with capabilities that drive higher match rates. This creates a combination of scale and precision that improves on anything brands have been able to achieve in the past.

Opening up new opportunities

One positive consequence of these developments is the emergence of new media opportunities for brands. Publishers, retailers, and media companies have always had their own audiences and a wealth of first-party data, but they couldn’t do much with that data because they didn’t want to share it.

Now the ability to share this data in a privacy-compliant manner, where the platform or publisher retains total control, is driving the success of retail media and other media networks. A whole new segment of the industry is opening up and providing ideal environments for brands to find their customers and the customers they’d love to have.

Brands no longer need to deal with opaque audience expansion and obfuscation as they have in the past. They don’t need to waste advertising dollars reaching people who have nothing in common with their intended audience or lose out to the adtech tax. Instead, they can take their first-party audiences and identifiers directly to the publishers or platforms with which they want to work. The platforms can find those people within their own audiences and get the brand’s message in front of them.

As well as making far better use of their budgets, knowing precisely who they’re talking to means brands can use different tactics, like delivering personalized communications and offers. Financial services brands, for example, could potentially make pre-screened credit card offers via digital channels – previously only possible via direct mail.

In addition to working more directly with publishers and platforms, the ability to securely share data also opens up opportunities in the ecosystem economy. Brands can partner with brands from multiple industries, creating shared data ecosystems. These ecosystems allow them to deliver better customer experiences, drive more value from their first-party data, and achieve a faster return on their investment in digital innovation.

Making the most of identity’s new era

So what should your brand be doing to make the most of this new era of identity, where you can connect with real people rather than proxies? These four steps will set you on your way:

Unify your first-party data

We can’t say this often enough. Your first-party data represents your direct relationship with your customers, so it’s always the best place to start. Determining what data you have and unifying it in a single location and view of the customer is vital.

Add identity and data hygiene

An enterprise identity solution will help you assimilate your data so everything you know about each customer is linked. And data hygiene will make sure your information is accurate and up to date.

Expand and enrich your audience

Expanding your audience, either through lookalike audiences or data enrichment, will give you greater reach while maintaining precision. This provides greater scope for segmentation and personalization and will drive better results.

Make industry connections

Whether you’re connecting directly with premium platforms through data clean rooms, or entering into brand partnerships through data ecosystems, you can be specific about activating audiences and can reach them with precision.

With many brands still building out their internal capabilities, working with a partner may be the quickest way to get your data and identity foundation in place so you can start taking advantage of identity’s new era. To find out more about how to advance post-cookie plans (and why you should), take a look at our recent blog post.

This article was originally published by The Drum.