How to Approach the Increasingly Diverse and Fragmented Identity Landscape

How Tealium’s new Identity Partner Ecosystem helps organizations navigate CX challenges due to data deprecation

Identity resolution has been a primary purpose of the CDP since its inception. Tealium co-founder Ali Benham described the necessity of introducing user-level data to enrich the data layer way back in 2015 and the stakes of identity resolution have only increased since.

As the importance of accurately resolving identity and leveraging it within the marketing ecosystem has increased, so have the potential options on how to best do this. As with all things MarTech, the answer seems to lie in using a combination of identity vendors to produce the best outcomes for the unique needs of your business and, as such, marketers are experimenting with several.

Survey from AdExchanger shows that Marketers are adopting identity solutions, in addition to first party data collection, to address 3rd party cookie deprecation (one of the primary drivers of signal loss).

But experimenting with several approaches to identity immediately raises a fundamental conflict given that the goal of identity resolution is to have a single source of truth, available organization and ecosystem-wide.

Tealium’s extensible and interoperable approach to the MarTech ecosystem combined with our deterministic identity resolution core provides marketers with the perfect environment to navigate this dichotomy

Starting with the Core

Tealium’s approach to identity resolution has been consciously consistent from the 2013 launch of AudienceStream CDP – When managing your first party data core, digital identity must be managed deterministically to allow for real-time stitching, full control and visibility into exactly how identities are stitched, and for a consent management audit trail.

Real-time Identity Resolution
Tealium resolves IDs within a fraction of a second of the stitching criteria being met. Other identity resolution solutions require batch processing and taking from 24 hours to 90 days to update profile information.

Control Over Stitching Rules
Deterministic identity resolution provides a configurable approach for customers who want control over how profiles are stitched. This is a strict requirement for certain use cases and preferred in more conservative industry verticals such as Pharma and FinServ where risk mitigation is most highly valued.

Consent Management Audit Trail
Privacy regulations require that an advertiser be able to prove that the individual being targeted has consented to this activity. Rules-based, deterministic stitching allows for monitoring of the consent journey and provides an audit trail should consent management standards be questioned.

After a first party data core has been established using deterministic principals, there are myriad ways to increase profile robustness and interoperability. Luckily, Tealium connectors are in place to remove the heavy lift that can be associated with onboarding a new partner.

Introducing Tealium’s Identity Partner Ecosystem— Stitch Deterministically, Enrich Probabilistically

Tealium’s new Identity Partner Ecosystem, available today, gives organizations a proven way of extending their privacy-safe, first-party data foundation with these diverse identity solutions to construct a better customer experience.

This approach provides an agile foundation of data for CX that can be activated in real time, provides an auditable paper trail for consent and privacy, and the high-confidence matching necessary to power a diverse set of enterprise use cases from customer support (where probabilistic techniques aren’t ideal) to customer acquisition (where scale may depend on probabilistic techniques). And, if you are coordinating marketing globally, gives you the flexibility to adapt to geographic regulations, like the strict controls on data processing in Europe or the newly introduced and enforced regulations throughout APAC.

Quick note: Flexibility is key in adopting this array of solutions though, as the integrations vary from tags, to connectors, to custom integrations.

The value provided by partner solutions generally falls into four categories. Many vendor solutions span two or more of these categories:

As you can see, the Tealium Identity Partner Ecosystem includes a variety of solutions, each playing a different role in helping your organization deliver a better, privacy-safe customer experience. Tealium provides the extensible first-party data core on top of which you can build a more agile and resilient tech stack. 

Here are a few highlighted identity solutions in the Identity Partner Ecosystem:

• Merkury, Merkle’s identity resolution platform, helps organizations master cookieless identity through control and transparency.
• Acxiom Real Identity rTag provides the ability to flexibly instrument digital channels with data collection capabilities, identity generation and association, privacy governance and containers for managing invocation of partner tags.
• Integrating with UID2.0, an open source ID framework created by The Tradedesk, which can be used instead of of third-party cookies.
• Use the Tealium and Auth0 integration to connect your Auth0 User Data into Tealium’s CDP, enriching visitor’s profiles through Auth0’s identity resolution.

To explore the full depth of integrations available in the Identity Partner Ecosystem and how each solution fills in a piece of your tech stack puzzle, visit the Tealium Learning Center (TLC) to get all the details. And keep your eyes open for more options (or let us know if you have a request) as we add to the ecosystem.

Check out more on the Identity Partner Ecosystem

See how our Identity Partner Ecosystem is evolving in phase 2 in this blog post