• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 5, 2021

Identity is messy. Faced with data chaos, marketers need to think outside of their silos. Working with one provider drives accuracy and less data loss.

In the coming year, there will be some significant changes across the industry, from Apple's IDFA to Google Cohorts.

And while congressional gridlock might get in the way at the federal level, many changes will occur across states, said Michael Schoen, senior vice president and general manager of marketing solutions at Neustar. "I'm pretty excited about the economic recovery," he said. "The U.S. has been successful in terms of the rollout of vaccines, and that will drive spend."

To support the change, Neustar Unified Identity recently launched to give marketers a complete identity management solution that enables resolution of offline to online identifiers by responsibly connecting people, location, and device data.

Allstate relies on Neustar for anonymized household-level measurement and analytics, offline data enrichment, digital audience syndication to its demand side platforms and the ability to control household impression frequency.  

Marketers are challenged when dealing with identity in individual silos of data. They often rely on multiple companies in which their systems do not communicate. “We refer to it as data chaos,” Schoen said. 

The identity graph platform OneID powers the Neustar Unified Identity from Neustar, a global information services and technology company supporting identity resolution.

The idea is to enable better data management decisions and outcomes for brands by supporting data onboarding, linking, enrichment, and validation.

The platform ties into Neustar’s analytics solution to improve accuracy, which can be challenging to measure. Internal data shows Neustar Unified Identity is 20% to 30% more accurate compared with competitors. The most concrete measure is whether it contributes to the total economic impact.

Forrester Consulting identified bottom-line benefits as part of a total economic impact study. The findings illustrate the impact of unified analytics during a three-year period. The study found that the impact contributed about 458% return on investment with Neustar Unified Analytics and a $11.51 million net present value, as well as creating $189 million in incremental revenue gains due to higher return on ad spend with Neustar Unified Analytics.

Counting the exposures to marketing materials or seeing an ad is important, but “as consumer perspectives on privacy and industry regulations evolve, we may get to a point where much of the media ecosystem looks like what Neustar has driven with Facebook,” he said.

Schoen said the company's clients spend a significant portion of their media budget with Facebook. Consumers are concerned about privacy, so Neustar incorporated safeguards into its platform that do not impact or share consumer behavior.

“How many impressions served has been a proxy for marketing impact, and if you can get to the end answer about marketing impact, the proxies are less relevant,” he said.

A partnership with Facebook began in 2016 to improve on lead quality and performance, and then expanded in 2018.