Audience Data Sessions: what are the four 'P's of identity?
What are the four ‘P’s of identity? And why are they important for marketers’ customer data strategy?
In our latest Audience Data Session (ADS), Kristina Prokop spoke with Rick Erwin, chief executive officer of Adstra, who shared the history of the Adstra business (formerly known as ALC), the core components that underpin identity, and his future vision for data in cookie less advertising.
Eyeota and Adstra have been working together over the past few years to activate the many different data sets they possess. A recent rebranding of the company from ALC has also coincided with a lot of new products being brought to market under the new Adstra brand.
Two years ago, Rick Erwin and a team of ten industry veterans bought ALC, a company that had been in existence for 40 years and kicked off their plans to expand the company’s offerings for first-party data monetization on behalf of its direct marketing clients. Erwin’s team were from an enterprise data-and-identity-for-marketing-purposes background and wanted to rebrand the ALC business to reflect a broader customer focus and highlight the additional online data strategy it intended to pursue.
“We did two things: first we built a US platform that translated any form of customer identity into other forms and we then license that data to help brands and their partners to either create or strengthen what we call their ‘identity spine’,” says Erwin.
“The second thing we did was to make it easier and more economic to use people-based data in every insight, targeting, and measurement application that you can. By doing this, we intend to disrupt what is a stodgy data industry. The industry uses the terms ‘offline and online data’, but to us, there is really just ‘real-world data’ – it’s the only data that can be used to understand consumers better and improve consumer target advertising.”
“So that’s what we’re doing now – bringing together all that real-world data, connecting it to an accurate and persistent data spine, and making it economical to use in any application,” Erwin says.
“When you say more economical, what does that actually mean in practice? What does that look like to your end customers?” asks Kristina Prokop.
“The data industry has not done a good job matching the price of people's data with the value in use,” says Erwin. “It turns out that it doesn't make sense to charge $5 for a 1000-consumer name audience to optimize 15 cent per-thousand media online. It just doesn't work.”
“What we've done is created lots of different ways to break down the economic barriers. One of which, the most obvious of which, is just what an audience costs on a per-thousand (CPM) basis.”
Post-cookies
The much-debated issue about how transaction IDs will be measured with the eventual deprecation of third-party cookies is also something Adstra has been preparing to adapt to.
“It’s funny,” Erwin says. “When we began the journey with Adstra to create this disruptive company we really didn’t plan on the deprecation of cookies, but actually our platform is perfect for that environment. We really just wanted to create a platform that could translate any form of identity to any other, but now it turns out that’s exactly what brands and their partners need from us in this new post-third-party cookie world!”
Erwin adds that every form of identity is represented on its platform with the ability to move between them seamlessly. Consequently, there is no one form of identity, which if deprecated, would hurt the company’s position.
He thinks the best thing for everyone, including consumers, would be to see all forms of identity being free and open. But if that were not to happen, Adstra’s platform positions it well to simply translate to the other forms of identity that are represented.
“There's a great deal of emphasis on first-party cookies, and our match partner network is dominated by first-party cookie identity, which is federated. So, we're feeling like our platform is very well situated to allow us to continue to help brands and their partners whatever the future may bring,” Erwin says.
“You’ve been in the industry a long time. Is this shift in identity bigger than anything you’ve seen in the course of your career?” asks Prokop.
“Such a great question because I think we act like that in our industry. We act in the present as though what we're experiencing is the worst thing we've ever seen. I don’t feel like it is. I feel like the one thing that's constant in our industry is that there's always a seismic shift in marketing and advertising and all of its forms, there's always something big happening,” Erwin says.
“If you've got two hands on the wheel, we'll all be fine. It doesn't mean that we won't go through turbulence and hit some potholes on the way, we certainly will, but we'll get through!”
“I agree,” says Prokop. “If you've lived through a couple of these large transitions before you see what comes out of the other end is, most of the time, a much better way of working than we did before. I think there's a lot of opportunity out of what's happening, and I think it's a good transition. It's something that I think we all need, and it was inevitable in some way, shape, or form.”
Diversity inclusion and distributed working
What have been the big learnings from 2020 and the disruption to working practices caused by the pandemic?
“One of the things, for me personally and as a business leader, is the power of distributed labor,” says Erwin. “And I think everyone's got at least a casual appreciation, even before this, that we can do a lot more remotely than we used to be able to do. I'm not talking about that casual awareness; I'm talking about a big awakening to the power of distributed labor. I think that we have a chance now to learn how to get work done differently, not just do work remotely, but to do it differently. I just think this has a massive upside for diversity and inclusion too because we can perform work at an A grade level anywhere with any type of talent.”
“While there's a lot of companies in Silicon Valley who have a tremendous devotion to diversity and inclusion, when you walk through the engineering department, not so much diversity, really. Right? I think that this gives us a real opportunity to change that going forwards. But also, I've been surprised at how resilient the advertising industry has been. It's been challenging and certainly, you can see agencies have taken some real hits and had to recover from them, but here we are in the worst global pandemic in a hundred years and people are buying things and people are responding to advertising and advertising is still, thankfully, allowing access to a lot of content that otherwise would cost consumers more than they could afford.”
Adstra saw a dip in audience data revenue in the 20% to 25% range from late April through to mid-June, but Erwin says it's almost completely recovered now. Erwin thinks the resiliency of people in the adtech industry has been amazing.
“We all know that being remote and unable to be together at industry conferences and events and even just meetings have changed the way we work together. It's really created feelings of isolation for a lot of people and we're all going to have to learn to get past that as we reopen up. But I think it has also highlighted the resiliency that people have, the fundamental ability people have to pick themselves up and do their job and provide value to clients and move the needle, and I think that's all very encouraging.”
Prokop agrees. “I've been really impressed with the way everyone has pulled through and, thank goodness, I feel very lucky that our industry has turned out the way it has.”
How does Erwin see the rest of 2021 panning out for the industry?
“We should all expect there to be even more gnashing of teeth over the next year because that's what our industry does! As we moved toward the start date of GDPR, I remember that last Ad Week Festival before GDPR went into effect, was the peak of the panic and so we'll expect to see more of that; but more importantly, I think we'll see a delay to the ID deprecation that we're talking about. I think we'll see a bit of a postponement to that,” he says.
Erwin continues: “I don't think anybody should plan their business around that postponement, but I see enough in the tea leaves that I think that it would be prudent for Google and Apple to take a breath and maybe not make that the hill that they want to die on. I think I would expect a little bit of a delay to that ID deprecation.”
The other prediction he makes is that there's an awakening to the value of PII among people who are native to digital media. Hashed email, which is a form of PII, is very safe generally, from a privacy standpoint, says Erwin. He thinks the industry could solve a lot of its challenges if it just focused on safely knowing who's doing what.
“So, I think we could be seeing an ascendancy of the safe use of PII in various forms of digital media and I'd like to see that continue. I think it would be great, not only for our industry, but more broadly for the global public perception of how we use the internet to talk to each other around the world.”
All that makes a lot of sense,” says Prokop. “And I also agree that the speed with which that change is going to happen was, I think, massively overstated. I think it'll be a year of a lot of preparation. We can't slow down, in terms of preparing for those changes, but I think the reality is, until we stop actually transacting on our traditional identifiers, it's going to be a little bit of time before the big changes impact us.”
Eyeota's agnostic approach to identity ensures the seamless global distribution of data and delivery of consumer-friendly audience solutions for omnichannel engagement. To learn more about Identity and how Eyeota is preparing for the deprecation of third-party cookies, visit our dedicated Identity page.