CANNES — In a media and marketing landscape more fragmented than ever, the concept of identity resolution is fundamental to being a bold marketer.
So says Matt Spiegel, EVP of TransUnion’s TruAudience Growth Strategy, who believes marketers must stitch together a full picture of people and households in order to drive growth.
“Every marketer is working towards some level of more growth, performance, personalized experiences,” Spiegel says in this video interview with Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein. “The commonality that allows you to create a seamless infrastructure or seamless experience rather, is an identity resolution infrastructure.”
Identity Underpins Marketing Funnel
Identity resolution is not just about the technical pipes, Spiegel says. Rather, it underpins the entire marketing process.
“Having an understanding of real identity allows you to go from planning to figure out who are my customers, and then start to think about who would I want to reach?” he says. “Doing really sophisticated modeling to find the people that are actually going to drive growth ultimately through to measurement.”
Without consistency in understanding who consumers or households are, “you lose the ability to be really confident in your marketing strategies,” Spiegel adds.
Making Identity Easier
One of the key challenges in identity resolution is stitching together different device signals, platforms, and environments.
“It turns out there’s a lot of work under the hood there, and it takes sometimes too much time to get data where it needs to go,” Spiegel says. “Sometimes there’s too much loss, sometimes it’s too expensive to make all this happen.”
TransUnion is focused on making identity resolution easier, faster, and more configurable. The company has been in-market with identity resolution tools, but is now working on “stitching ’em together into a set of interfaces and APIs that makes it easier to access simplistically,” Spiegel says.
AI Speeds Insights
Artificial intelligence is also playing a key role in identity resolution. TransUnion has long used machine learning algorithms to find patterns in data that would take humans too long to discern.
Now, the company is also leveraging generative AI and large language models to enable non-data scientists to use natural language prompts to discover new audiences and trends.
“How do you make it so a non-data scientist, a lay person who is a marketing strategist, can come and write the correct prompts, discover new audiences, find trends in performance that you wouldn’t have necessarily seen by asking smart questions IE prompts,” Spiegel says. “That’s something that is a huge part of what we’re building.”
Identity Anchors Good Marketing
As the marketing ecosystem coalesces around the importance of identity, Spiegel believes TransUnion’s message is resonating.
“Identity resolution is a strategic to foundation, to big, bold marketing,” he says.
“And we’re really trying to continue to say there’s a way to take out the complexity of this, that you can be anchored on identity resolution.”
You’re watching coverage of Beet.TV’s Global Leadership Summit: Data, Identity & Measurement, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2024, presented by Digital Turbine, IAS, Intent IQ & TransUnion. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. To view all of Beet.TV’s Cannes Lions 2024 content, please visit this page.
