Gerry Bavaro, Merkle’s Chief Strategy Officer for Merkury, participated in an Advertising Week interview session about marketers moving on from third-party cookies with a new platform that offers enhanced identity capabilities. I’ve distilled the highlights.   

A lot has changed since the announcement of the death of the third-party cookie. Marketers realize the magnitude of the shift to first-part identity, as evidenced by the sizeable investments in identity resolution. Now they’re seeking to drive monetization.

The Client View on Audience Targeting

There are two categories of clients with different views of audience targeting and the roles that Google and Facebook play:

1. Clients who already have a large universe of first-party IDs (retail, financial, auto) have never liked traditional data management platforms (DMPs) and digital, third-party cookie-based identity. They’re heavying up on addressable cross-channel experiences and excited about the growth of person-based ecosystems. Merkury is helping them maximize first-party identity and data across marketing, commerce, and service.
2. Clients who don’t have a large first-party universe are struggling to grow with the walled gardens of Google and Facebook. They need education about how to transform into a cookieless future; that’s where Merkury identity resolution comes into play, helping them build and grow their first-party private identity graphs.

Marketers want to learn about how to transition to a first-party world of identity and data. One thing in common among brands is that they know they need to shift away from traditional technologies like the classic DMP, a third-party cookie store, and the ways they scale audience-based media and programmatic but also use the same basis of identity to power CRM, personalized experiences on-site, in app and drive commerce.

Merkury ID

Merkury, Merkle’s identity resolution platform, contains four components:

• Identity – Brands can license the Merkury ID as basis of their private identity graph. They can treat the entire PII-based US population as if it’s their CRM database.
• Data – Brands can license up to 10k+ attributes built from third-party offline data sources. We have proprietary and specialty data products from Merkle, and leading marketplace data from Oracle, Experian, and others which get appended to the Merkury ID.
• Connections – Synchronization of 35+ direct premium publishers enables cookieless addressability.  Connections to adtech and martech platforms, all resolved to Merkury ID.
• Merkury Clean Room – A privacy-safe data and analytics environment enables you to bring all of your IDs (CRM, first-party website visitors, media exposure, partner second-party data) into the environment, understand all data and touchpoints at person level anonymously, and close the loop of exposure to actions like sales.

Emerging Channels

Marketers want to own identity, not rent it from opaque platforms like Google and Facebook. They want to know how to use PII-based, first-party data as a basis for consumer engagement and ID graph growth and control. To address this, consideration should be given to identity resolution providers that have flexibility and scale among all channels and technology platform connections and are not over-indexed into one channel like programmatic display.

One of the largest misconceptions is the idea that you must have a direct-to-consumer scaled business model (e.g., Netflix) to take control of identity. Every interaction with a consumer can be used to create a persistent first-party ID that helps build a strong, private identity graph, if you’re leveraging the right identity resolution solution.  

To learn more about identity and the Merkury solution, check out Merkle’s website.