Originally posted on The Drum.
An overwhelming majority of marketers today recognize the centrality of identity to marketing performance. But Keith Camoosa, chief product and technology innovation officer at Acxiom, argues there remains a critical gap between what identity could enable and what organizations can actually deliver. He shares the three strategic components brands need to successfully usher in the next phase of identity.
Marketers don’t need convincing about the importance of identity resolution. New research from Acxiom, in partnership with eMarketer, reveals that most marketers (90%) use identifiers of some kind to recognize customers across channels and boost marketing performance today.
This confidence in identity resolution is fueled by over 80% of marketers seeing ROI on their identity efforts – efforts that help address some of marketers’ most acute challenges. The biggest impact has been on improving personalization, for example, which is critical at a time when a third of consumers say they’ve switched providers, stopped using a brand, or abandoned a transaction this year because the experience wasn’t personalized to them.
While marketers are now doubling down on identity resolution, with the new research showing 61% plan to increase investment over the next 24 months, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s all plain sailing from here on out. In fact, there’s still some way to go to maximize the value of identity. The advent of AI, increasing privacy demands and more complex data environments are making it both more vital and more difficult to scale identity infrastructure.
To take identity to the next level, marketers need to unify identity inputs into a connected foundation that works across enterprise channels, platforms and partners. They need identity resolution that’s cloud-native and inherently interoperable, reducing reliance on any single identifier or provider. We can break this down into three steps.
1. Invest in first-party data
Google’s announcement about deprecating third-party cookies has compelled brands to make better use of their first-party data. Encouragingly, Acxiom’s research shows that over half (52%) of marketers have maintained their investment in first-party data since Google’s partial U-turn. But this demographic vastly eclipses the 6% who report significant increases in spending following Google’s announcements.
With over half (55%) of marketers admitting their first-party data is either completely siloed or only partially connected across systems, brands must keep investing in their customer data foundations. Otherwise, they risk perpetuating or embedding fragmentation in their operations, which is cited as one of the biggest factors hamstringing marketing performance. And it’s not enough to connect first-party data across business units. Marketers also need to ensure it’s clean, up to date, and enriched with second- and third-party data to create a strong, unified foundation for their identity strategy.
2. Focus on interoperability between identifiers
The second pillar of connected identity infrastructure that marketers will need to solidify as they reconcile a greater number of identifiers is interoperability. Although marketers are increasingly adopting a multisignal framework – spanning channels, partners and AI-driven environments – their ability to connect interactions across multiple identifiers is still relatively low. Just 23% say their systems are fully interoperable.
This is partly due to an over-reliance on identifiers such as email and hashed email. These identifiers can’t support interoperability on their own, as they’re not consistently available, universally standardized or freely shareable across platforms and environments.
Marketers instead need to combine multiple signals to create a more complete customer view. And with that comes the need to drive interoperability between all these identifiers to support data connectivity, activation and scalability across the marketing ecosystem.
As Yory Wurmser, principal analyst at eMarketer, explains: “Redundancy is really important in identity resolution. Using multi-identifier strategies helps overcome gaps caused by consumers jumping between devices or sites. Even if you can link two signals with just one ID, the second identifier can add richness.”
Identity resolution solutions can help by creating a persistent, privacy-conscious identity layer that’s interoperable by nature. Rather than relying solely on identifiers such as email, these solutions use a broader identity graph and high-precision matching to consolidate disparate data sources. This ensures brands always have a consistent customer view across platforms, channels, devices and partner ecosystems, and aren’t dependent on any single identifier or identity provider.
3. Take control of your identity strategy
The third and final piece of the puzzle is about committing to a formal identity strategy. This is what brings together the approaches I’ve discussed for scaling identity and shapes them around each organization’s business goals. But it’s something 25% of marketers say their organization still lacks.
Some organizations leave identity management in the hands of multiple teams, incurring the inevitable silos that result in little to no shared decision-making. This disconnect leads to inconsistent customer views, duplicated efforts, poor governance and disconnected experiences.
A centralized strategy is one of the best things marketers can do for identity resolution. Establishing clear ownership and defining accountability keeps marketing, data and technology teams aligned around the brand’s identity strategy. Organizations can then activate data consistently across channels and effectively adapt identity resolution to evolving privacy and interoperability demands.
An identity graph sits at the heart of a connected strategy. This foundational tool turns disparate data points into a single interoperable identifier, which brands can use to take control of their identity strategy. But only 50% of survey respondents currently have a private identity graph. It’s a major missed opportunity to unlock a unified customer view and connected foundation that catapults the organization along the identity maturity curve and maximizes marketing performance. Brands must own their identity graph, not rent someone else’s.
Make the move from fragmentation to interoperability
The research signals brands realize identity has become a competitive differentiator. But few are yet treating identity as the holistic foundation of connected customer experiences. Only by doing so can organizations ensure robust compliance around data collection, give AI models the complete data they need to make tactical decisions, and prevent splintered activation across channels and teams.
It’s no longer about chasing individual identifiers but stitching them together with a unified, interoperable identity foundation, anchored in a first-party data strategy. That will decide whether marketers reap the rewards of identity resolution or find themselves facing a new kind of identity crisis.