Real Talk: How Identity Fuels the Collaborative Future

Typically brands think about things in forms of funnels, I’m going to drive a customer experience for my brand, but now I think that the customer’s asking for something different, they’re taking more control, and we live seamless lives where we’re engaging with multiple brands throughout the day. How are they going to participate in my life? I think that’s kind of the core of the topic.

Kyle:

Yeah, no, absolutely. That whole aspect of the fact is we’re all consumers, and so this isn’t a topic that we’re talking about that is for someone else. It’s really for ourselves as we are just out living our daily lives. And so as marketers, how do we engage in a way that we want to be engaged? And that’s really the fundamental piece to the future, which is this concept of the ecosystem economy. You did touch on there about some of the recent news and such. So certainly just want to touch on that briefly. Certainly the Omnicom purchase of Interpublic Group, that’s a very big event and could be a very impactful situation for the whole ad tech and MarTech ecosystem, but the reality is it’s kind of a reflection of what we’re talking about today.

Dustin:

Absolutely.

Kyle:

And it’s this convergence of the ecosystem where what traditionally may have been a competitor or an alternative is now someone that you as a brand and as a marketer are going to look at as someone to actually engage with and to help build a solution and an offering to create an experience for the consumer that is unlike anything that you’ve had in the past. And so I think that’s really the fundamental piece, and it’s the buzzword that’s kind of around that is this term ecosystem economy, but really it’s the next generation of just collaboration, right? It is taking it to that next level. So what are some of the trends that are driving us to this?

Dustin:

Yeah, I think one of the trends is the fact that the data marketplaces where a lot of brands get to put their first party data, and I kind of want to land there for a second, the importance of first party data, it’s really your brand’s right to participate in this new kind of economy, this collective economy. Because if you don’t have a relationship with the customer, what are you going to match on? How are you going to engage across brands in these new kind of collaborative experiences? So emphasizing the importance of a first party data strategy I think is huge, but where you put, it’s also huge. Now technology’s really advanced over the past five years, which has allowed us to get to what we’re talking about today. So you think about clean rooms, think about places where marketers, you don’t have to have a massive amount of resource dev resources to go out and through an experience, bring your data sets together inside of the clean room and data marketplaces like Snowflake and Databricks. So I think those are two key things. What are some maybe other areas?

Kyle:

Well, I think even in those, right, what’s different is the fact that we’re needing to take those to the next level in terms of identity. Because bringing it back down to that level and it’s really creating an identity solution and a connective tissue layer across these various technologies and platforms so that these new types of engagements and customer journeys can be enabled effectively. Thinking back again, personalizing it for myself, if I’m going to engage with a brand, say I want to take a trip, historically that may have been a combination of multiple engagements, both with an online travel agency, it may have been with a car service, which I may have booked through that, but I’m still having to go to each individual vendor or partner and say, Hey, here’s my loyalty id. Here’s how you identify me. And the reality is, even like me being in the industry, I still might present myself differently to each of those partners, but what I ultimately want is a seamless experience, and we’re taking that onus from the consumer to where I have to go out, I have to establish my identity, I have to provide the right credentials and the right signals to each of them to ensure that at least there’s some kind of continuity across this multi-partner engagement to now we’re wanting to shift.

And this ecosystem economy is about shifting that onus onto the partner ecosystem to say, Hey, Kyle May present himself differently to each one of you, but you need to figure out how to seamlessly integrate that. And whether it’s through a clean room, whether it’s through APIs or direct connections, cookie list solutions, whatever it may be, it shouldn’t be on the consumer to have to ensure that that connectivity is taking place.

Dustin:

That’s right. I think you said it’s like the shift in the mindset of marketers has to be like, let’s stand back 20,000 feet and say, I don’t go buy an airline ticket for the sake of buying an airline ticket nor a hotel or travel insurance. I’m buying a vacation.

That’s the shift. Not living in this kind of isolated just about my brand, what I’m going to deliver the customer, but that seamless experience and it takes identity to make that actually work. And the analogy I like to use is like say I invested and bought some Maserati and I spent all my investment, everything on the car, but it didn’t save enough money to put gas in it. The car’s not going to actually drive without gas. And I think that’s one of the main things that we’re trying to emphasize with brands is prioritizing that data layer, the identity layer. It’s so important because the applications, they’re great. We need those clean rooms, we need the data marketplaces and AI and all those things, but none of those things work if you don’t have the fuel, the data and the identity in place to actually connect it all the glue that holds it all together.

Kyle:

Yeah, no, that’s excellent. It reminds me of an example that Steve SCH Smith, one of Acxiom’s Automotive Group associates recently put out there in A POV, and we will link to that in our online site, but in that he talks about the EV experience, talking about automotive, I have an ev, I want to go somewhere in that EV and that may be at a hotel and I’m going to spend the night and it’s an ev, so it’s going to need to be charged, and likely that’s going to have to go through a third party charger. And so having a seamless experience is what I need. I want to be able to feel comfortable just driving my car to a hotel, having a charge and leave without having to necessarily engage multiple times and provide multiple different user experiences to accomplish my ultimate task, like I said, which is not, Hey, I want to go spend the night somewhere so I can charge my car. It is because I’m traveling to go see family or whatever it may be. And that’s where my focus needs to be and the ecosystem needs to enable that in a seamless fashion.

Dustin:

That’s right, Kyle, we’re both, we call ourselves identity wonks all the time, and we can’t expect everyone that’s listening to really understand what we mean when we talk about identity. So maybe it’d probably be good for us to maybe dive just a little bit tactical here just to give us some context. So identity is honestly, and identity management is a subset of data management as a whole. So when I’m going, I buy something in the store, there’s transaction data, my order, my customer ID that might be associated to that. A lot of times I’m providing my name, my address, email, or when I’m engaging on a website, what I experience on the browser, what pages I visit’s, one thing, but the IDs behind the browser, maybe an IP address, device IDs, cookies, may talked about that subset, those touch points and signals is really what we’re focused on when we’re talking about identity.

And there are gaps, right? When you’re going brand to brand, like you said, different brands have different, I might’ve shared one email address with brand A and the different email address with brand B, same person, two different touch points. You tried to bring those together, you’re not going to get a match. This is where players like Acxiom, this is where third party like reference census base consented graphs come into play to basically bring those things together and that’s the enabler. And to put those natively inside the context of these data marketplaces like Snowflake to make it accessible, but then to cooperate with a collective ecosystem, there’s other players as well. So you cross ID spaces to ensure reach.

Kyle:

And certainly like you said, it is a complex problem and there’s part of the ecosystem, especially in the ad tech realm, it’s coming off of a season where there was kind of an easy button, it was third party cookies, and while there was a lack of precision and a lot of times there was a lot of just lack of clarity on really who you were engaging with in that ecosystem, it was just something we could all deal with. Well, as that’s been transforming and we’re moving to more of a first party based ecosystem now, actually it’s our chance to really realize the true promise of customer based marketing,

Putting the consumer at the center and really creating these opportunities to say, Hey, I’m not going to look at a consumer from only my lens, but I’m going to look at ’em from their lens and I’m going to shift that view to say what does this experience look like? And then how can I as the marketer as a brand understand to ensure that as I relate to my partners leveraging a robust identity framework to say, oh, we can connect Kyle to Kyle, to even a pseudonymized version of Kyle in a privacy compliant fashion. So that not only are we enabling that existing experience and we’re meeting the customer’s expectations and preferences, but we’re also maximizing the value of my own data that I have now. It’s actively part of this ecosystem, but it’s protected. And that’s where, like I said, clean rooms come in, we talk about zero PI exchange and such, and then it’s actually making use of those technologies that I’ve as a marketer have already invested in my CDP, my CRM, my relationship with the DMP, all of these areas where historically I’ve had to move data around to create a connection.

Now they’re being brought together in a privacy compliant fashion where that data’s not having to move, but I’ve got a secure ID layer that I’m actually transacting on that now. I’m able to make those informed decisions.

Dustin:

I like that. Delivering on the actual promise. I do think that the industry’s made that promise for quite a while when actuality we’re sending customers down these kind of isolated funnels. Now the technology’s in play and with identity playing that kind of key central role to truly deliver on the promise and just kind of back to the size and scale of this opportunity, it’s not just another business trend, right? McKinsey calls it the single largest economic transformation in human history. So they predict that by 2030, the ecosystem economy will drive 30% of global. So let that sink in for a second. That’s 30% of the entire global economy. So that ecosystem causing isn’t just a far off idea either. I mean basically all these things have been happening in the background. It’s happening now and there are some real live use cases that we’re already seeing multi-brand participate in to drive that seamless this customer experience. So it’s super exciting

Kyle:

Times that is exciting and it is coming back to thought of fulfilling the promise, right? We’ve been talking about frictionless payment for a long time and there’s some technology that’s been enabling that such as now we have RFID and near field type activities where I can make payments or I can move through a location with facial recognition or whatever it may be. There’s these frictionless capabilities, but they’re again isolated. They’re in these silos. It’s for a point in time function and starting to bring those together where you start looking at the gig economy. So you start looking at the integration of Uber Eats. So Uber going into more of a delivery model and the ability to partner with retailers and be able to say like, Hey, or Starbucks, someone’s coming here or Starbucks, whoever it may be. And it’s like, Hey, you can transact with one, receive a delivery on the other, but also make and actually close the transaction frictionlessly. And it just creates this an ease of use for the consumer where I’m not having to think through, oh, I want to say Starbucks. Yeah, I want to order my Starbucks now I’ve got to call somebody to go pick it up and then transact with them separately and then hope it gets delivered. And so it’s just that integrated nature is driving it.

Dustin:

How frustrating is it when you’re a loyal Starbucks member, for instance, to go buy through another platform and not get points. So that’s kind of part of what we’re talking about too is this kind cross loyalty, the ability to, in an Uber eat situation, to drive loyalty in both brands at the same time and not be disconnected. One of the great things about live here is I don’t know who all got to see the Simpson’s takeover of the NFL game last night. So this is a somewhat immersive experience. So now we’re starting to get dimensional in the ability when we start talking about augmented reality, virtual reality, bringing in different experiences. I mean, I envisioned being on a headset soon at scale, but say a brand like Coca-Cola or something like that after Bart throws a touchdown, Coca-Cola popping up and saying Score now enjoy a refreshing drink. I mean these are the types of things that you’ve got the NFL involved. You have a massive consumer goods brand involved. You had the Simpsons involved all engaged in the central ecosystem. So these use cases are happening today. They’re already taking place and they’re prime for brands like ones our listeners represent to participate.

Kyle:

That’s great and a great real world example right there. And another one that I just read about this morning was for those suffering from Parkinson’s, one of the ways to handle or to deal with some of the symptoms is to have lines on the floor to help you focus and be able to manage the muscular control. But with augmented reality now those lines can be placed anywhere. You don’t have to have a physical representation of that. They can be augmented through your glasses or however you’re seeing the world and that can actually help you. So we’re really getting into some life changing technologies. And so now you start to mirror that with marketing opportunities and such. It just becomes kind of mind blowing, honestly, I sit back and I’m just like, wow, we can sit here and pontificate all day long, but I know we don’t have all day long both for those online and for those here in the room, we want to be able to continue to transition some questions, but I did want to touch, talked a lot about the use case, and we kind of touched on some of the technology, but let’s kind of just run through the technology real quick, kind of vast.

You’ve seen the Lu Escapee just even on the MarTech side has exploded exponentially exploded over the last several years and now the ad tech exploding and certainly technology and the cloud computing and ai. So walk me through real quick some of the key technologies that are kind of converging to make this possible.

Dustin:

Yeah, I mean I would say that definitely I would say CDPs, one of the things that we started here about back in 20 18, 20 19, it took the place of the DMP because of the cookie list things, the regulatory things happening in market, the ability for brands who’ve already made an investment in CDPs, and they’re different whether you’re in Adobe Salesforce or treasure data, whatever you’ve chosen these technologies, CDPs are now starting to sit on top of the snowflakes and Databricks so that they’re plugging in, they’re software. So we’re starting to hear this word, and I think that’s going to be key because the days of monolithic platforms just going all in on one big massive bit of software that’s kind of fixed. And now we’ve got to in some ways put a square peg in a round hole. Those days are over now brands, they’ve already made some decisions, they want to test new decisions. Things are hitting market so fast, that composability factor. And then where data’s sitting at rest, people don’t want to move data, which is why the data marketplaces are starting to explode. You have different identity providers putting applications like Acxiom. We put our real ID capability native in Snowflake and Databricks. So we’re starting to participate in that ecosystem. And then I know Snowflake, they acquired some muha. You’ve got info sum, some of the software technology that is doing clean room type functionality.

Those are kind of the integral parts in the backend that’s going to feed the agent economy. So Kyle, that’s the top, that’s what everybody’s talking about. Now, AI agents, where does that fit in?

Kyle:

Well, again, it’s an enabler. So agent AI technology is the fact of having a AI agent that can run autonomously that’s been trained and then can sit there and just execute against orchestrated workflows and be able to deliver a level of both reach and precision and scale. That is hard to achieve without that because now it’s running 24 7. It can be monitoring your chatbot interactions as a brand. It can be engaging directly then into emails, and it can be informing other downstream analytics systems. So it can be running models in real time against again, this behavioral data, transactional data, the identity components, because all of that starts to break down if you’re associating the wrong data with the wrong person at the wrong time and the wrong place. I know it sounds like a lot of wrongs, but that can happen and you want to pull that together tighter.

And AI is the next level of building out those engagements. But there’s an age old adage, garbage in, garbage out. And a lot of that is around some of Acxiom’s core competencies around hygiene, identity resolution, data enrichment, getting that foundational set so that when you’re exposing into these ecosystems through clean rooms or through an AI agent system, whatever it may be, it’ll function. And somebody out there may be saying, well, I mean, is identity really that important? And just a simple example, we’ve worked with some of our clients in a clean room environment where they’ve been matching with a partner and honestly their matching was like 15% and they were feeling good about that. And with your nascent technologies, that is probably a good match rate by bringing a referential graph of identity to be able to look at those disparate representations of a consumer to facilitate the match. We’ve seen that 15% match rate go up to like 60 plus percent for X. That’s a massive increase. That has huge implications on that journey for the consumer, not just as a great for you as a brand and your partner to be able to like, oh, we match better. It’s ultimately because delivering an experience to the consumer and that’s increased.

Dustin:

And I would say too with ai, the source of the data is so important, the trustworthiness of the data that’s delivering its insights and what it’s going to feed off to ensure it’s not hallucinating, not just maybe taking internet or synthetic data, but actually first party data, truth-based data to drive informed decisions to help feed the models. It’s super important. Is it time to get into some questions

Kyle:

Real quick? Yeah, we got one question. It’s come in and so I do co-op marketing now. What makes this ecosystem concept different?

Dustin:

Yeah, so co-op marketing, fair question, right? It’s been around a long time and a lot of what we just talked about, I could see where somebody would go, wait a minute, apple and my smartwatch and some fitness app. Those things have been kind of happening for a while. The difference here is all the technology in the background that’s enabling not just two brands to come together and it’s really pivoting. I said this at the beginning towards really integrating into the human experience where co-marketing is like two brands building a co funnel and you’re sharing data together. We’ve done this on on-prem solutions in the past. Now we’re talking about really integrating this kind of co-brand experience. And we talked about the vacation or even buying a home, the mortgage lender, the insurance agent, all the different things that come with that experience down to furniture. Having that central ecosystem to drive that seamless experience that’s going to produce that crazy number that we saw from McKenzie Predict 20, 20, 30.

Kyle:

Yeah. Excellent. So if you guys have any questions, feel free to post those out there and we can try to address those now. We got a few more minutes left. We will touch on one more that came in here. And how do you evaluate potential partners for collaboration? That’s a great question, right? The first thing I would say is what is the customer experience you’re looking to enable? What are you trying to do? We can go out and there’s a lot of partners in the ecosystem and you can have a lot of conversations, but at the end of the day, it’s what does it do for the consumer? That’s what we’re trying to do is this whole ecosystem economy is about putting the consumer at the center and enabling use cases. So what’s that use case? Then understand what partner can compliment that, can really do that and think outside the box. Because like we’ve talked about ones that are way out there, and there’s one recently also about, it was a hotel chain partnering with a pet retailer to help enable as consumers, if I’m traveling with a pet, not only do I know it’s a pet friendly hotel, but I can also via that reservation, pre-order food from a local pet supplier to be delivered. So it also engages a delivery partner to bring that pet food to that hotel. That is how you start to evaluate your partners

Dustin:

Totally. What’s the natural human experience, what’s a fluid seamless experience that we can all relate to? And I think inserting yourself into that I think is key. Instead of thinking just in terms of how am I going to push my brand onto consumers, it’s how am I going to integrate my brand into a seamless human experience? I think is a difference there.

Kyle:

I like that. And honestly, we’re kind of coming at the end of our time here, so that’s a great kind of place to land the plane, but it’s that seamless human experience, I believe is how you put it for the consumer and as a brand to really just start to shift that mindset to that and how to enable that. And the technologies are there, the partners are there. Your investment’s probably already been there, and it’s just a matter of stepping back and really understand how to connect those and ensuring that you’re doing that on an identity framework that is robust, scalable, and brings a level of accuracy and precision that you need to enable that

Dustin:

And trust, right? I mean, I know consent and we talk about first party data being the currency, but honestly, I see consent being the new currency, having that trust, the desire from the consumer, the human to be known to be engaged by these brands. But I think that’s going to be a key element in differentiating yourself in the future in this kind of collective ecosystem economy as well.

Kyle:

That’s awesome. Alright, well that is all the time that we have for today. And so first I want to thank our studio audience and those who joined us online. Dustin, great to talk with you as always, and we look forward to engaging with everyone in the new year.