MARKETING
A guide to the strange new world of identity resolution
Effective marketing depends on knowing who you’re marketing to. In the digital world that’s becoming harder than ever as third-party cookies are phased out. Speaking at The MarTech Conference, Integrated AdTech CEO Ken Zachmann walked listeners through the challenges and opportunities of identity resolution in this new environment.
“Cookies have been what we’ve really focused on to do everything that we do as marketers,” Zachmann said. “This big change that’s happening, and not to be dramatic, but we’re calling it the cookie apocalypse.”
Here’s some cookie apocalypse numbers: Chrome accounts for more than 50% of all browser usage. So, when third-party cookies are gobbled off Google’s browser, that’s a loss of 50+% of that information. That’s on top of the 30+% lost when Safari and Firefox killed cookies. You can understand the eschatological reference.
Get the daily newsletter digital marketers rely on.
Life after cookies
There are still many ways to gather information, of course. However, they all come with their own identity resolution drawbacks.
- Personally Identifiable Information data providers (PII): These are companies like LiveRamp or Acxiom or Experian Marketing Services who take PII information – first name, last name, email – and build profiles of individuals and households. “The challenges that they’re going to face when they build out these identities is scale,” said Zachmann. “As increased iOS limitations come on, as increased consent management from different states are released, they’re going to have to really work very diligently to make sure that they’re maintaining proper consent to manage these different PII standpoints.” There are also issues about interoperability, he added. These providers like to keep their data to themselves and have companies use their stacks for activation and measurement.
- Probabilistic data providers: They make probable assumptions about what a group of intenders or users or consumers are going to be doing. They use a subset of seed data, one-to-one level data about someone. That could be an email from a place they’ve registered, then the provider will add data from other places where that email address has been used, like e-commerce, news, etc. This lets them build a pretty good demographic picture of this person, without knowing who they are. From there the provider will use this small seed set of data and blow it out using look-alike modeling or analytics. “It can be very effective as far as getting more scale,” said Zachmann, “but the accuracy gets decreased and oftentimes we’re paying for users who may or may not be interested in the offer we have on the table.”
- Authenticated hashed email (HEM) data providers: They take regular email addresses and encoding them using a cryptographic hashing function. This creates an obfuscated string of characters, or hash, to represent the email. This creates an identifier that doesn’t share restricted information and can then be used as a single unified identity used for tracking across channels and devices. relate to either household propensities, intent, behaviors, contextual reading behaviors. “The problem with these hashed emails is that they only have about a 20% to 40% reach,” said Zachmann. “Because they’re hashed and because hashed email really can’t be either denominized or shared … you kind of have to stay in their world or in their sandbox.”
- Data Management Platform (DMP) data providers: These are companies like Oracle or Lotame and others that build backbones of data. They use their own first- and second-party data and assign a proprietary ID to them. “Tricky part about DMP’s is that while they have large scale they don’t often have the ability to have their ID interoperable between other platforms,” said Zachmann. “Like moving the ID to say the trade desk where you want to activate your ads or moving it to a measurement partner that you already use. Oftentimes those ID’s right now don’t talk together and it’s really difficult to do addressability and measurement when the DMP’s ID is more insulated.”
- App data providers: They collect information about where and when their app users engage in content and make purchases. And they’re able to stitch that data to a household IP, which gives them yet more data. They are in the midst of their own “APPocalypse.” Apple now requires them to get users’ consent for collecting data. Although Google is dragging its feet on the issue, they are moving in that direction and already require apps to disclose what is being collected and why. “I think right now the opt in rates across the US is only about 24% of iOS users who are opting in to be targeted on their device,” said Zachmann.
- CTV: A lot of the people who cut the cord with cable TV are using connected TV devices like Roku and Fire TV Stick. Those devices have IDs and the companies combine that with your IP address and first party data to create the information they sell. “They have a known measurement stack and are becoming a bigger part of the pie,” said Zachmann. They can be part of marketers’ data mix, but not all of it, he added.
There may be a solution
The best currently available solution is also one of the hottest new buzzwords: Clean rooms.
These use privacy-enhancing technology which lets data owners (including brands and publishers) share customer first-party data in a privacy-compliant way. This makes it possible for first-party data for the same person, from different sources, to be combined even while they remain anonymous.
Read next: Why we care about data clean rooms
“They’re really … shaking up the identity landscape because they’re providing this system where you can go in, put in your data [and] they’re going to take care of it for me,” said Zachmann. “They’re going to cleanse it, make sure all the opt outs are removed, make sure everything is done, and all the consent management profiles are maintained.” They’re a good way to deal with both interoperability and privacy issues, he added.
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.
-
SEO6 days ago
Contact Us Page Examples: 44 Designs For Inspiration
-
SEO7 days ago
Google’s Advice For Ranking: Stop Showing
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: March 22, 2024
-
WORDPRESS6 days ago
WordPress Block Themes Explained in 250 Seconds – WordPress.com News
-
PPC7 days ago
The 8 Best Lead Generation Ideas from Marketing Experts
-
SEO7 days ago
Save Time With Keywords Explorer Tool
-
PPC6 days ago
Mastering Lead Generation in Paid Search Advertising
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Google March 2024 Spam Update Done Rolling Out
You must be logged in to post a comment Login