CHICAGO – The new ways in which audience identity are having to factor in advertisers’ playbook will prompt ad buyers to take on new duties that previously were handled for them.

That is the view of one agency executive who sees the key theme of 2021 being all about filling the identity gap.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Starcom SVP Director, Solutions Architect, Willie Jackson explains what is changing.

First-party top priority

Mainstay audience tracking methods like third-party cookie matching and mobile device identifiers are diminishing in utility as tech companies, pushed by GDPR and CCPA either deprecate them or switch them to explicit opt-in.

That is pushing marketing toward gaining real, opted-in relationships with audiences or, at least, their data.

“As we head into 2021, the key challenges, the key opportunities, for marketers and publishers is that we want to solidify and shore up our first-party data foundations,” Jackson says.

“Data preparedness is going to be at the forefront of the initiatives that a lot of marketers and publishers are navigating in the next year and change.

“What you’re going to see in the marketplace with the publisher and advertiser ecosystem is a deep interrogation of ways in which to translate that first party data into an addressable identifier in the open marketplace.”

Graphing identity

Across the entire industry, “identity” has become the hot new buzzword, as players look to fill in for the withering of cookies and device identifiers.

Some in the industry are not so sad about their demise, saying those old methods only ever identified devices, not people, and that they still present challenges in how to join up device identifiers into single user profiles.

“I think there’ll be deterministic device graphs that still exist and will continue to thrive as they are rooted in a strong first party data foundation and backbone,” Jackson says.

“But you’ll also see a lot of direct engagements with publishers and supply-side partners.”

Safe havens

Jackson thinks a hot new area will be in both publishers and their brands bringing their own respective audience data to the table – that table ad targeting systems.

However, that is going to require technology that ensures neither partner’s side can see audience data it should not, to adhere to privacy norms.

“(That includes) being able to go directly to your publisher partners that you’ve worked with in the past, working in a way to create a safe haven or intermediate ecosystem through which you can do matching with your first-party data against their first-party data,” Jackson says.

“That would then create your addressable list, your list of IDs against which you’ll buy in the marketplace.”

You are watching “The New Media Reality: A Consumer-Centric View of Identity and Personalization Emerges,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Transunion. For more videos, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews