At LiveRamp, we have been powering and leading innovation in the martech ecosystem since the earliest days of digital. We have seen the ebb and flow of DMPs, DSPs, and SSPs, and we have helped our clients connect with their audience and measure media performance while adapting to the rise of walled gardens, mobile devices, connected TV, and data collaboration. Now, with digital signal loss increasing and cookie deprecation imminent, we’re seeing marketers reevaluate their strategies and partners.
We believe there are two critical components to leveraging your data effectively across the advertising ecosystem: identity and connectivity. But these distinct core concepts are often conflated or confused. Let’s set the record straight.
What is identity in advertising?
When we talk about identity, what we mean is enterprise identity. Every company needs to own its enterprise identity strategy and determine its own identity rules, including how to map different data points back to an individual or a household and how customer data matches are defined across different touchpoints (like email addresses, devices, and website activity).
Before you do anything with your data, you need an accurate view of every consumer, and you need to ensure that your identity rules are perpetuated consistently across the digital ecosystem.
Why? Companies have varying amounts, sources, and quality levels of first-party data and different business needs. A company in a highly regulated industry or with detailed measurement needs will need exceptionally accurate and robust identity mapping, while companies focused on targeting or expanding reach might determine that email matching is good enough.
Why LiveRamp? You need a partner who can help you develop a resilient and scalable enterprise identity strategy aligned with your specific business needs and requirements. You need the most accurate, connected customer view possible at the individual and household level, created using the industry’s most robust, continually learning knowledge base. And you need that customer view to be matched accurately and responsibly, according to your rules, across the digital ecosystem, with uncompromising standards for data ethics, privacy, and security.
Watch out for: Providers over-indexing on high match rates without transparency into how those match rates are determined. Anyone can increase match rates by loosening the rules of what defines a match, but those matches are worthless if they aren’t accurate.
The difference between identity and connectivity
We draw a distinction between identity and connectivity, because knowing who your customers are and being able to reach them across the increasingly complex digital ecosystem are two entirely different things.
Why? Just as match rates can be misleading if those matches aren’t accurate, matching customer profiles is not useful unless you can actually reach those customers wherever they are spending their time.
Why LiveRamp? You need a partner who can connect and translate authenticated traffic across hundreds of brands and publishers at scale, using RampID, the most durable, privacy-centric connector for the digital and martech ecosystem. You need a partner who can help you ensure data integrity and maximize accuracy and scale by connecting your data seamlessly and flexibly across virtually any consumer touchpoint, including mobile devices, social media, and connected TV and more than 400 direct partner integrations.
Watch out for: Providers tied to a specific identifier or are overly dependent on third-party cookies, hashed email, or other digital identifiers that won’t stand the test of time. We believe that no single identifier will win, so the ability to accurately connect identifiers in any combination while respecting consumer privacy choices is a far more durable strategy.
Unlock flexibility by leveraging identity and connectivity
As the world’s most innovative companies increasingly turn to data collaboration, these core concepts of identity and connectivity need to be available wherever your data resides, which is increasingly in the cloud. Being able to leverage identity and connectivity for new collaborations in any cloud or across clouds, in near real-time, will be a crucial competitive advantage.
Why? Every time your data moves, it increases cost, risk, and even carbon emissions. Bringing tech to your data instead of the other way around helps minimize these factors while allowing you to activate new partnerships more quickly and flexibly.
Why LiveRamp? You need a partner with the flexibility to collaborate wherever data lives and to support the widest range of data collaboration use cases. We are investing heavily in our cloud partnerships to eliminate the need for data movement and to power collaboration with unmatched speed and ease.
Watch out for: Providers promising low-code or no-code solutions, which sound appealing but may not offer the flexibility and scale you need over time.
Learn more
To learn more about LiveRamp’s enterprise identity and connectivity solutions, check out these resources:
