How People-Based Identity Will Change The Way Marketers Think About Success

With big privacy changes coming, marketers will soon have redefine success when it comes to attribution, argues Deb O’Sullivan Vice President Enterprise Sales Australia and New Zealand at LiveRamp in this piece.

Apple postponing its plan to make IDFA opt-in across devices means brands everywhere are enjoying a temporary reprieve. This deferral to early 2021 buys valuable time for marketers in the race against the impending deprecation of device IDs.

However, these imminent industry changes are not the only motivation for marketers to implement interoperable infrastructure, people-based identity models. Changes in consumer digital behaviour and lifestyle also provide increasingly convincing reasons for marketing practices to transform.

For instance, Australians are using more devices than ever. According to a recent Telsyte research paper, the average Australian household now has nine internet-connected devices. This proliferation of devices demands an identity infrastructure that enables marketers to better understand and engage with their end user across multiple touchpoints.

This means that people-based marketing is growing in popularity as savvy brands look to get ahead of the curve and become among the first to adopt addressable solutions that don’t rely on unstable identifiers.

Shifting how we think about success

Interestingly, as future-focused marketers begin widely adopting these solutions, the way they think about the metrics of success is also likely to undergo a fundamental change. New benchmarks will arise as more and more brands embrace people-based identity and addressability, with a stronger emphasis on quality of impressions, in addition to quantity.

This paradigm shift will be driven by the fact that brands will enjoy increasing control and precision in targeting across multiple channels, improving a campaign’s ability to deliver a highly relevant and seamless experience to audiences.

The enhancement in audience targeting capabilities will see marketers start to alter the standards for calculating a campaign’s success. With addressable solutions, people-based identity features like outcome-based decision making, frequency capping, audience suppression and sophisticated retargeting remain possible even after the deprecation of the third party cookie. These solutions provide marketers with the ability to optimise marketing impact across channels and audiences – often in real-time.

For brands, this means seamless omnichannel campaigns, more accurate and meaningful measurement of ROI, and improvements in fragmented customer data.

In short, how marketers think about success is likely to evolve, with benchmarks for performance naturally undergoing finetuning based on the way addressable platforms deliver unique value.

Successfully quantifying the impact of addressable solutions rooted in people-based identity with Fitbit 

Popular health and fitness technology brand, Fitbit ran a campaign that illustrated this distinction between people-based advertising and cookie-based models.

To measure the difference in ROI between the two approaches, Fitbit launched a campaign to reach its high-value audiences based on the same parameters but delivered either through cookies or via a people-based identifier by leveraging LiveRamp’s Authenticated Identity Infrastructure.

What Fitbit found was that people-based identity gave their marketing team the unique ability to more accurately quantify the impact of marketing and ensure that they would be able to continue measuring business outcomes on the same KPIs. .

In fact, they were able to achieve two times higher return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to third-party-cookie-based  targeting. Fitbit’s cost-per-page-view (CPPV) also decreased by 34 per cent and they saw a 13 per cent increase in their average order value (AOV), proving the efficacy of a people-based strategy.

It’s clear that the adoption of addressability solutions rooted in people-based identity will transform the marketing ecosystem. People-based identity translates to improved addressability. And, when the underpinning identity infrastructure is neutral and interoperable it lends to a healthier, more competitive ecosystem for all, including consumers. When marketers begin to focus on the consumer, rather than only what they know at the device or browser level, they will have more control and gather greater insights.

Case studies like Fitbit’s show that brands can improve business outcomes with the ability to reach addressable high-value audiences by using people-based solutions that are privacy-first, consumer-friendly, and secure.