The Industry is Coming Together to Solve Customer Identity Challenges

Mariona Prat Vila, Director of Global Marketing at zeotap, on the launch of the company’s new universal ID initiative ID+

The demise of third-party cookies and other platform identifiers - as well as a fast-changing regulatory landscape - are seriously challenging today’s marketers.

According to a report published by BCG in 2019, 83% of CMOs and advertisers are still not able to make connections across consumer touchpoints and devices. Separately, a report published by Google last year reveals publishers lose an average of 52% of revenue (62% in the news vertical) when third-party cookies are disabled.

Identity resolution remains one of the fundamental needs of brand marketers, but increasingly more roadblocks are being put up to thwart that. Marketers need the ecosystem to step up and provide a better solution now more than ever. 

Enter the “universal ID” - a game-changer not only for marketers but also for consumers. IAB India & SEA addressed this need back in 2019 - saying that with a universal ID, marketers could work towards delivering unique messages to each customer at the optimum time, heralding an era of greater personalisation across multiple channels.

Just last week, zeotap announced its ID+ initiative, designed to give the marketing ecosystem -brands, publishers, agencies and technology platforms alike - a privacy-compliant mechanism to overcome identity resolution challenges arising from ID fragmentation, cookie restrictions and increasingly stringent regulation across the world. 

The ID+ project is an open invitation to the entire industry to collaborate on a collective vision for the future. More than 20 global, regional and local organisations have confirmed their public support and adoption of ID+, including Accenture, Annalect, International Business Times (IBT), Imágen Digital, ItaliaOnline, Mediasmart, OMD EMEA, Prensa Ibérica, PubMatic, S4M and Tabmo.

ID+ is based on four core tenets: 

1. Independence: It doesn’t rely on cookies, MAIDs or any platform identifiers. Instead, it’s based on deterministic offline identifiers and is valid across all platforms and channels
2. Simplicity: It can be adopted easily and works as a standalone first-party identity layer as well as in conjunction with homegrown or other solutions
3. Interoperability: It’s available to connect with all other (universal) ID solutions
4. Compliance: Every ID+ record has consent traceability baked in, and data protection is ensured via tokenisation

For brands, ID+ provides a solution to resolve identities accurately and at scale for effective omnichannel marketing. For publishers, ID+ is not only a compelling solution to ensure their revenue models remain unaffected by upcoming changes, but an important step to leverage their first-party data to provide value-added options to discerning marketers. 

The time to solve the identity problem in an increasingly challenging environment is right now.