Identity Resolution – a rapidly growing marketing technology category that is seeing increasing adoption for both martech and ad tech use cases – is fast becoming a staple for enterprise-size marketing organizations. It is also increasingly being baked into other customer data management solutions, such as customer data platforms (CDP), data management platforms (DMP), and customer identity and access management software as a necessary feature.
The goal of identity resolution is to get a holistic view of the customer’s interactions with the brand in an omnichannel environment, which is key to turning data complexity into an opportunity for exceptional customer experience.
In the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising for 2019, identity resolution is almost coming out of the ‘peak of inflated expectations stage’ and moving towards the ‘trough of disillusionment’, as marketers figure out the best use-cases and where they may get optimal returns from their investments in identity resolution.
The choice of identity resolution tool/ platform vendor in this situation is a critical one for marketer, as they work with this evolving technology to help optimize customer data management outcomes in 2020 and beyond, as channel, device and consumer marketing complexities only amplify further.
In this feature, we highlight some of the leading identity resolution software platforms and the companies behind them, to help marketers make a more informed choice of partner in 2020.
But before that, let us recap the core functionalities of an identity resolution system, based on which we have identified the top 10 vendors.
Learn More: Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing: Key Differences and Similarities
Core features of an identity resolution software solution:
Data onboarding: the process of bringing all the available online and online customer data from first-, second-and third-party sources into a single system.
Real-time and persistent matching and resolution at scale: depending on the purpose and use-case, the platform should execute probabilistic or deterministic matching to create one single unique individual profile of each customer, which is persistent (changes with any change in customer’s use of device, channel, platform or address) and real-time.
Identity Graph: further enrich the PII (personally identifiable information) collected in the customer profile with additional third-party data from marketing partners or data vendors and data available in the public domain.
Integration & Activation: making these 360- customer profiles available to other adtech and martech systems to activate campaigns.
Compliance: adhering to prevailing regulations that define how ‘personal information’ must be treated in a particular geography, industry or time frame.
The Top 10 Identity Resolution Software Companies for Enterprise Marketers in 2020
Here are the top 10 identity resolution software companies (vendors), selected based on overall feature requirements for mid-to-large scale enterprises and listed alphabetically:
1. Acxiom: offers powerful deterministic matching capabilities to help marketers recognize consumers accurately across offline and digital channels, and then activate that data to preferred marketing platforms using its large set of pre-built integrations. That means the best way to leverage existing tools in the martech stack with a ‘single source of truth’ data. They specialize in automotive, financial, retail and travel verticals. An interesting differentiator is that they allow marketers to apply their own brand-specific identity rules tailored to specific use cases, and that effectively helps create a competitive advantage for the marketer.
2. Criteo: focusing on acquisition-related use cases, Criteo helps marketers target the highest potential shoppers and ensure that they see messages and offers that have the best chance of conversion, thus ensuring the best return on digital advertising. While Criteo is a full-blown adtech software platform, its audience matching functionality delivers high match rates so marketers can target and re-engage customers with dynamic paid display ads across the web, mobile browsers, and apps.
3. Infutor: excels in data-driven identity resolution and in linking disparate 1st party and 3rd party datasets to create a single, 360-degree view of customers and prospects. They have one of the most complete and accurate Identity Graph solutions on the market that accurately identifies and segments consumers before, during and in-between engagements – giving clients a secure, privacy-compliant foundation to improve inbound engagement and outbound omnichannel marketing reach.
4. LiveRamp: describes itself as a ‘best in class’ identity resolution solution that can transform consumer data from any touchpoint into meaningful ‘person-based’ identifiers to run sophisticated data-driven customer acquisition and retention campaigns. Their product IdentityLink helps build an omni-channel view of the customer for brand marketers, agencies, data owners, platforms and publishers, and supports over 500 technology platforms for targeting and activating the data for personalized campaigns. LiveRamp’s ability to combine offline data and online data provides both accuracy (with deterministic matching) and privacy compliance.
5. Merkle: identity resolution, according to Merkle, is the ‘linchpin to a people-based marketing strategy and integrated marketing technology stack’. Merkle’s proprietary identity graph collates the best available identity information across hundreds of contributing partners, to identify, enhance, and activate people-based audiences for orchestrated, multi-channel campaigns. The solution links data across platforms manage compliance and extends identity into second- and third-party resources to help brands create effective customer experiences, in-the-moment that it matters most.
6. Neustar: Neustar follows the ‘Privacy by Design’ principle for responsible identity resolution. A good fit for marketers who operate in regulated environments or where data security is mission-critical, Neustar enables marketers to onboard, identify and match customers’ data based on personally identifiable information (PII) and digital identity. While they also offer comprehensive analytics, CX and Adtch solutions, Neustar’s identity resolution capabilities focus on delivering a persistent, single, enriched view of customers irrespective of the channel, platform, or device in the virtual and real world. The solution is especially useful for marketers operating in complex multi-channel environments.
7. Signal: Among the few pure-play identity resolution software platforms in the market, Signal specializes in continuous data onboarding to reconcile disparate data sets and deliver 1:1 addressability, 360-degree customer views, and person-level insights — for intelligent, real-time media activation. An interesting differentiator Signal’s ability to recognize unauthenticated visitors across channels and map unauthenticated device IDs (visitors who do not log-in) to a persistent brand identifier, such as a CRM ID, in a brand’s identity graph. This helps build a much more compelling picture of the customer journey, resulting in better messaging and conversions.
8. Tapad: with its proprietary Tapad Digital Graph, Tapad focuses on serving brands and agencies with a digital cross-device graph. The average number of devices per consumer is going up every year, and Tapad says an average consumer shift between those devices up to 27 times in one hour! For brands ad marketers seeking to target these new-gen consumers across the full range of devices, channels and platforms, Tapad’s identity resolution solutions give the ability to connect with consumers across devices with a better understanding of touchpoints, and customize marketing messages across paid, earned, and programmatic campaigns.
9. Throtle: Throtle offers the full comprehensive range of identity resolution functionality, from data onboarding, identity resolution, intelligence, analytics, and measurement. Their ‘closed loop’ solution best serves marketers that need a deep understanding of their audiences to laser-focus marketing efforts on best-fit prospects and customers, versus executing broad and shallow acquisition campaigns. The Throtle ‘Truth Set’ is a dynamic set of billions of data points to keep up with constant changes in consumers’ terrestrial and digital identity such as addresses, phone numbers, email IDs, etc.
10. Zeta Global: Zeta Global’s Private Data Cloud (PDC) offers first-party data with 750M+ unique identity profiles and over 500+ Artificial Intelligence derived intender audiences. They claim a 65%-80% identity resolution and connectivity rate. Zeta’s native integration with activation in both paid and owned channels lets marketers trigger a real-time communication via the Zeta Marketing Platform – as soon as an ID is resolved and a consumer intent moment is detected.
In addition to these identity resolution software vendors to watch in 2020, there are many smaller identity resolution players that serve the SMB market at one end of the spectrum; and at the other end of the spectrum, there are also full-fledged customer data platforms (CDPs) such as mParticle and Amperity that have highly advanced identity resolution capabilities baked in to the larger solution. For a more comprehensive list of CDPs that include identity resolution, please read the Customer Data Management Platform Buyers Guide 2019, MarTech Advisor (with special section on Identity Resolution vendors)Opens a new window