Is your brand facing an identity crisis?

A new article on Search Engine Land says that people want to go where somebody knows their name. Identity makes it happen for brands, and getting it right drives personalization and trust.

The author says that people shop in stores and on websites that recognize them and welcome them back. They like offers that match their interests and are delighted by great experiences. Sometimes they want to be fully known; at other times, they want their privacy maintained. To make this happen, brands must constantly keep track of the known and pseudonymous information about people. This process requires identity. It should be the core of your madtech stack.

Top brands make sure they know who they are talking to and deliver the best possible experiences based on what they know about them. This is referred to as identity resolution, and it’s at the heart of what advertisers and marketers need to get right to deliver on their brand promise. The art and science of identity have evolved with technological advances and the need to facilitate an incredibly complex series of decisions and actions to deliver the right content to the right person or persona – all in milliseconds. While some of this is informed by third-party cookies, the amount of information available has declined substantially and will be largely gone next year, with Google no longer providing tracking information from the Chrome browser. Apple and others are already out of that business.

Google’s eventual exit has created quite the buzz about a world without third-party cookies. Acxiom is a customer intelligence company that provides data-driven solutions to enable the world’s best marketers to better understand their customers to create better experiences and business growth. A leader in customer data management, identity, and the ethical use of data for more than 50 years, Acxiom now helps thousands of clients and partners around the globe work together to create millions of better customer experiences, every day.

The company sees the madtech world with identity at the center. If you start with collecting information, you’ll get both useful and distracting data. It comes from sources you know to be better – your first-party data from direct interactions with a person – like emails, loyalty programs, CRM, and mobile device IDs. This is known, or offline, identity and forms the basis for a first-party identity graph.

Acxiom helps brands focus on that private domain – meaning advertisers’ first-party data and relationships are key. The customized graph is built specifically for the advertisers’ enterprise and tailored to their specific requirements. From there, the goal is to extend that identity capability across use cases ranging from traditional direct marketing to measurement of paid media.