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The power and limitations of universal IDs

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Something must replace the cookie. It’s due to disappear by the middle of next year.

Marketers are checking out zero-party data, first-party data and cohort analysis. But don’t forget universal IDs.

At its most basic, the UID should recognize the user, compile their information, and share that data with approved partners. How that is done varies, as there is no standardized method or practice for doing this.

“Universal IDs come in two main forms: authenticated and inferred. Authenticated IDs are built by using unique pieces of user data, such as an email address. Inferred IDs are created by device-level data, such as an IP address, user agent string, and device model,” explained Mike Sweeney, head of marketing at adtech and martech software development company Clearcode. “Some universal IDs would use both user-level and device-level data to enrich the IDs and help improve match rates.”

The good news is that the UID is one pathway to a future without cookies. The bad news is that the pathway is not entirely clear, and the future is a bit hazy.

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Cookies and UIDs both have their limits.

“Every company that sets a cookie has their own ID, and then has to basically do a live exchange of information or share a common cookie space,” explained Rob Armstrong, SVP for product at data transformation company Eyeota. “That’s partly why we’re in this problem because a website could have a carpet bomb of 50 different companies creating cookies.”

“While there is no one-to-one replacement for third-party cookies, universal IDs are probably the closest thing the programmatic advertising industry has to them,” Sweeney said. “However, they lack one key advantage — scale.”

A UID requires a consumer action, like providing an email in exchange for more information, while a cookie is slipped into the user’s browser simply upon visiting a web site, explained Tom Craig, CTO at consumer intelligence platform Resonate. While a cookie can track a user across multiple domains, the UID is limited to the domain the user visits. “This limitation is one of the primary reasons that marketers need to be thinking more broadly than UIDs as they plan their go-forward marketing strategies,” Craig said.

How a user identity is established requires an authentication. “Email is the easiest way to do it in the U.S., where log-ins are usually email address,” observed Chris Bell, VP for Product Management at Oracle. “In Asia, it’s the mobile phone number.”

“You have to shift. Try to meet the user where they are with the piece of personal information they are comfortable giving up,” Bell added.

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One size does not fit all

UIDs are not standardized — yet. LiveRamp, The Trade Desk and ID5 are a few among many vendors offering solutions in the UID space.

The Trade Desk’s approach with Unified ID is to generate the UID using the email address provided by the customer, usually in exchange for site access or additional material, Sweeney explained.

“Companies like LiveRamp, Tapad, Signal, Neustar, Zeotap, Epsilon, Flashtalking and others, would also use email addresses to generate an ID,” Sweeney continued. “But they would also use other pieces of deterministic and probabilistic data collected from different sources, e.g. cookie IDs from web browsers, mobile IDs from smartphones, and IP addresses.”

“Proprietary solutions will never get the scale to be viable solely on their own,” Craig said. “Each site needs to implement a solution for it to be addressable, and those sites will not likely implement proprietary solutions.”

“Standardization brings adoption and it brings capital investment. It brings stability, and it’s lacking,” Armstrong said. “This is why we see certain companies having a much more prominent universal ID posture because of their presence in the industry and being a known entity that a lot of companies are working with.”

Read next: Sharing The Trade Desk’s Unified ID will not end adtech disruption

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Many players in a game with few rules

The UID market is young, with about 40 or so vendors all providing solutions, Bell noted. Starting such a company is easy. What’s hard is “getting one to be meaningfully different.”

To succeed, they must “have a strong touchpoint” with publishers, so that they are using that firm’s UID scheme, Bell said. Then you must encourage adoption by adtech providers. It is a game about creating mindshare.

“The lack of standardization around universal IDs isn’t too much of an issue at the moment,” Sweeney said. “However, the sheer number of universal IDs causes issues around interoperability.”

For the digital marketer, it is too soon to place a winning bet on one UID. Some UID solutions revolve around deterministic identification, others rely on probabilistic determination. “It’s not clear at this point what the answer will be,” Bell said. If all these competing UID firms knew the answer, “they’d all be skating towards the puck.” He said. “My hypothesis is [there will be] a rapid winnowing down to a smaller number [of solutions].”


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Don’t throw your hands up in despair

UID is young. Best practices are still being discovered. What can marketers do?

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“Focus should be more about building relationships with customers and collecting consented personal data,” Bell said. And cover your bets in the vendor landscape. “Putting all your chips on a single UID scheme is risky.” Things will shake out in the next 12 to 36 months.

“It’s definitely a time of testing.” Armstrong said. “Test the parachute before you jump out of the plane.” Try to understand performance in regular browsers with cookies, tested against browsers without cookies, but using UID.

“Also be mindful of the methodology going into it. If it’s probabilistic, then it’s going to be more like a cookie. If it’s deterministic, it’ll look a lot different. And in that case, you could start to think about it a little bit more strategically versus just, does this work?” Armstrong added.

“I think a great first step would be to speak to your existing adtech partners and find out whether they’ve integrated with any of the universal ID solutions,” Sweeney said.

Craig offered this checklist:

  • What interactions are had with consumers, both customers and prospects?
  • How can those interactions be identified after cookie deprecation?
  • Is there an opportunity to capture or request email addresses from those interactions?
  • Which identity provider, if any, best suites the business’ needs?
  • Does my company have a strategy to increase coverage of identities and collect emails?

“Companies with email and UID collection will be able to work with programmatic platforms to target and retarget those customers,” Craig said. “They will have the ability to know more and take personalized actions with their customers. Without UID collection, marketing will become limited to contextual or cohort-based targets and all personalization will be a thing of the past.”


About The Author

Getting back to basics Marketing ROI
William Terdoslavich is a freelance writer with a long background covering information technology. Prior to writing for Martech, he also covered digital marketing for DMN. A seasoned generalist, William covered employment in the IT industry for Insights.Dice.com, big data for Information Week, and software-as-a-service for SaaSintheEnterprise.com. He also worked as a features editor for Mobile Computing and Communication, as well as feature section editor for CRN, where he had to deal with 20 to 30 different tech topics over the course of an editorial year. Ironically, it is the human factor that draws William into writing about technology. No matter how much people try to organize and control information, it never quite works out the way they want to.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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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.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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