Identity: Look Back/Look Ahead with Winterberry Group

Identity resolution is one of the most talked-about areas of adtech, and also one of the most complex as consumers become increasingly protective of their personal information. As this year comes to an end, we spoke with Bruce Biegel, Senior Managing Partner, and Charles Ping, Managing Director, EMEA, at Winterberry Group about the things that defined identity resolution this year, and what we can expect in 2023.

As a thought leader on this topic, what has been the biggest change/innovation coming out of the identity space this year?

Identity has become the cornerstone requirement to drive the rapid adoption of clean rooms for activation with scale and measurement use cases.

We are already in a post-cookie world — it's not an issue of when it happens anymore as it already happened — it's just not finished as companies continue to test solutions to get the most from their investments. The conversation about measurement currencies, which permeated the market in 1H22, also obscured the real critical issue of how to use identity to propel measurement and attribution.

With the rapidly changing advertising landscape, is a one-solution-to-rule-them-all approach to identity unrealistic? 

There is no single solution to rule them all and it is not desired by brands or media owners — no one is looking to cede that level of control. The real need is for interoperability to make multiple solutions work seamlessly together.

How are companies “moating” their data to gain competitive advantages?

It has been the focus on scaling first-party data to the greatest extent possible and permissible, leveraging emerging machine-learning based algorithms to increase that coverage and depth of the data. The walled gardens, coming from social platforms, media, and retail have had the first-mover advantage given their large subscriber and loyalty databases 

What are the core components of an identity-resolution strategy that advertisers should consider (ex. interoperability, transparency, privacy-compliance)?

Start with privacy or it ends with privacy. Then, it is about interoperability to make solutions work across use cases (insights, activation, attribution) and geographies (local, regional, and global) — and then it is about transparency, which comes back to the ethical and appropriate use of data. 

What is your biggest identity resolution prediction for 2023?

The use of identity within measurement and analytics will continue to bifurcate from its use in targeting and activation, as permissions under a range of legislations from CPRA, to UK GDPR, and elsewhere. This in turn will drive more federal regulation — providing better guardrails for the industry to operate within.

We expect to continue to see interoperability driven at the cloud/platform level (AWS, Google, Snowflake, Azure) as the storage and compute power underpins speed and enables more machine-learning based identity resolution.

Ready to learn more? Explore Innovid's Identity Resolution page here!