Recently, I had the pleasure of participating on a panel at the Criteo Commerce Forum. I had a great discussion with Criteo’s Vice President of Global Strategic Initiatives, Tim Rogers; and DICK’s Sporting Goods’ Manager of Digital Media, Bill Noel, about collaboration across the industry and how brands can work with best-of-breed platforms to achieve their marketing goals. Criteo and LiveRamp have a strong partnership that has only deepened over the years. The success of that partnership has driven results for DICK’S Sporting Goods and other data-driven marketers.
Here are three key takeaways from our panel that are essential for all marketers who value the power of data and working in a privacy-conscious manner:
Data-driven marketing can start with a crawl
Marketers who aren’t using first-party data to help drive their campaigns today shouldn’t shy away from starting small. Data-driven marketing can be daunting, but marketers can start with a “crawl” approach. By onboarding CRM data to demand side platforms (DSPs) and other relevant advertising platforms for targeting and suppression uses cases, you can immediately see the benefits. Once you start to see the benefits, more uses cases will open up and you can begin to “walk” and start to onboard transaction data to do basic attribution. Finally, when a brand has reached its stride and is ready to “run,” it can leverage SKU-level transaction data and data lakes to execute omnichannel attribution and optimization.
Break down the organizational silos
Marketers once siloed the programmatic buying team, the creative team, and the CRM team— and maybe they are still siloed in your organization. In our discussion, we emphasized how those silos must be taken down in order to truly execute a customer-first experience. Personalized and effective marketing requires leveraging the skills and assets of all teams. Bill Noel recounted how previously his digital media team would meet with creative only at the beginning and end of a campaign. While data should drive programmatic decisions, it should also optimize the creative. So, those meetings are almost weekly, integrating more closely with creative throughout every stage of the campaign, ensuring all teams are in sync with the data-driven decisioning process. Marketers have enormous data assets and every team within an organization should consider how they use them to drive more efficient campaigns.
People-based vs. device based
In an increasingly cookieless world, people-based identity is not only incredibly important, it’s fundamental. Marketers need to target and optimize across consumers—not devices—to create relevant experiences and messages. Companies will often say they have a people-based graph if they have hashed emails or a cross-device ID, but it’s not truly people-based identity. As a consumer, I use multiple emails for logins. I also use my phone number increasingly more frequently, and my offline purchases involve my name and address. My hashed email is not my only identifier. A people-based graph is so much more than a device or hashed email—it’s the capability to take any identifier and match it deterministically to the same person.
Criteo and LiveRamp have built a people-based integration in which LiveRamp sends transaction data directly to Criteo on the people-based RampID and then Criteo merges with their own people-based identity. Cookies and devices aren’t involved.
Visit our Criteo partner page to learn more about how we integrate with Criteo and to request more information about how you can enhance your omnichannel marketing with LiveRamp and Criteo.