I Am Not a Cookie

We are in the midst of a MarTech identity crisis. Are we human beings or are we cookies? Yes, this is the world we live in, and for the vast majority of vendors that you work with, visitor identity is nothing more than a cookie. While this might not create a problem for one vendor in one browser, consider the 20+ vendors that you work with, each of which are leveraging their very own special cookie to identify that same user. Now consider the essential task of having those vendors communicate and work together to engage that human. Add in multiple browsers and the exploding universe of native mobile and connected devices/IoT where cookies don’t even apply and “Houston, We Have a Problem.”

How do we get back to human identification across devices and data sets?

Smart companies are turning to brand new platforms built from the ground up to collect, correlate, enrich and activate customer level data. This is no easy task. Think of all the places where a customer has a chance to engage with your brand. Any vendor wanting to own this herculean task must be capable of collecting across web, native mobile, IoT, connected devices, POS, offsite, offline and anywhere else that customer might pop up.

Endless extensibility is the name of the game in the arena that you should be playing in. As data flows into the system, Tealium collects the data, correlates it to a profile, calculates enrichments and then applies rules against the profile to trigger audience inclusion and vendor action. That’s no easy task. While our products might look calm, cool and collected, we are hurriedly accomplishing this across billions of events on a regular basis.

All along the way, Tealium is building out something that we have coined the Deterministic Keyring. This is a collection of an unlimited number of unique identifiers that can be used to unlock MarTech tools and provide persistent ways, outside of cookies, to associate devices and data sets to a customer. Think of email addresses, loyalty ID’s, customer ID’s, phone numbers, order ID’s, device ID’s, etc. Gone is the concept of a Primary Key forcing other vendors to comply. The Deterministic Keyring ensures maximum coverage for device and data stitching and interoperability across 1000+ turnkey integrated partners.

Human beings are coming back to life ready to be engaged, remembered and thrilled with the experience they have with your brand. Everyone is struggling with the problem of identification. Look for a partner that goes way beyond a cookie-centric view of the world.