In the emerging world of targeted marketing, knowing your customers and prospects is becoming essential.

As that importance grows, so does the position of companies offering identity “graphs”, records of consumer profiles.

In this panel discussion at Beet.TV’s Identity In Focus leadership forum, two ad agency executives discuss how identity is being pieced together by both graph vendors and brands themselves.

Prohaska Consulting CEO Matt Prohaska interviewed:

  • GroupM head of data and analytics platforms for North America Tanwir Danish
  • Hearts & Science US CEO Erin Matts

“There’s a number, about 20, different measurement attribution companies all working on either their own ID graphs and/or being able to measure off of that,” Prohaska said. “Are you having to piece together ID graphs all over the place?”

Matts replied: “Frankly, a lot of (clients) are making their own decisions with regards to identity graphs. They’ve got their own, and I think most of the work that we’ve done in the past 18-plus months has been stitching together different identity graphs from major partners in the marketplace, client partners as well, and then thinking about how you enrich that with other data sets, too.”

GroupM’s Danish agreed: “Especially those that are at the high end of enterprise spectrum, they have internal investments (in customer data). That has evolved to now CDPs (customer data platforms), and there’s authenticated identity graph and first party identity graph.”

Hearts & Science’s Matts said identity graphs are important because advertisers should recognize that individual audiences are vastly different, that broad demographic buckets may not be suitable.

She said some clients are in-housing their customer data on to an Amazon Web Services environment and are not inclined to port it out, placing importance on linking together fragmented pieces of data in a privacy-compliant fashion.

This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews