People-based marketing is a term uttered in every corner of the martech landscape – from Fortune 500 boardroom and agency bullpens to strategy meetings at DSPs, DMPs, and measurement providers. But here’s the thing: **very few of these players are enabling proper people-based marketing because people-based marketing requires people-based identity, and not everyone has figured that out**.
It’s not an easy problem to solve. We each own several devices – at least a smartphone and a computer, and likely a tablet or a second computer, or maybe even a second phone. 3.64 devices per personOpens a new window is the number most-often cited, and I believe it. For us as consumers, that’s great. It means being always connected, with information at our fingertips. But for marketers, those three or four devices can quickly become a dozen unique identifiers – meaning browser cookies, mobile IDs, unit IDs, etc. And with the global proliferation of devices that we’re witnessing today, this means billions of identifiers for marketers to contend with and make sense of. Understanding that these IDs on their own are not representative of real consumers is a hurdle that most markets struggle with. That’s the exact reason true people-based marketing has caught on.
Two Ways of Seeing Customers
A lot of marketers see identifiers (cookies, IDs, etc.) as their customers. This siloed view makes sense in theory. Someone comes to a brand’s desktop site, makes a purchase, and the brand then cookies them. Someone comes to the mobile property, and the brand makes note of a device ID. But what happens when that’s the same customer?
If brands can see consumers holistically, as a combination of each of these identifiers in a true person-based approach, they can begin properly executing people-based marketing.
Today’s Holistic, People-Based Solutions
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Oath, and a handful of other walled gardens (Twitter, Snap, LinkedIn, etc.) have a clear idea of who people are because we self-identify when we log in. We share, like, and buy things across all of our devices, and because we’re logged in when we do it, those properties know exactly who we are, regardless of the device we’re using. Unfortunately, very few marketers have that clear picture, because these large players don’t let the data out. IE – Facebook has great data, but you can’t use it anywhere else.
But what if brands could leverage all that data? What if they could have a Facebook-like or Amazon-like view of their customers? That would enable real people-based marketing. And marketing should be people-based. **Devices don’t buy things, grow affinity with brands, or help amplify brand messages – people do**. And this is exactly the reason why brands like Electronic Arts are building their own identity graphsOpens a new window to better understand consumer habits.
What’s Next?
Once every brand and every marketer understands that only by connecting these identifiers into clusters of real people can true people-based marketing be enabled, I’d expect to see marketing and advertising become much more sophisticated. Among potential applications for people-based identity
- Holistic attribution. Use multi-touch attribution to get the full story of all the different touchpoints that occur on any device before a conversion.
- True person-based frequency capping. Set the maximum number of touches based on individuals on all devices, not on on desktop and mobile separately.
- Sequential messaging. Have a sequenced and seamless conversation with consumers across channels and devices, and tell them a story as they move along the path to purchase.
- Audience extension. Expand the number of touchpoints to reach a known audience across all devices.
- Site personalization. Give customers a consistent, tailored experience across all devices that builds brand affinity and eases their purchase path with product recommendations and other custom content.
- Seamless authentication. Less of a true marketing application, but still relevant to customer experience, is customer authentication. Use cross-device signals as additional data points to help understand if a specific customer is who they say they are.
“People-based marketing†is the “There’s gold in them hills!†for this decade, and we’re about to witness the gold rush for people-based identity. Some will get in early, stake their claims, and reap the benefits, but others will be late and find themselves falling behind the rest. Where will you be?