The third-party cookie may be going away, 80 identity solutions are vying to fill that void, according to analysis by marketing trade group MMA Global and Prohaska Consulting.
Even the savviest CMOs have difficulty keeping up with the different identity reconstruction options, said CEO Greg Stuart. “We are at a neophyte level,” he said.
Naming all the companies is the first step for the MMA’s project to educate its members on a complicated topic.
“Identity is what you don’t understand about advertising technology combined with what you don’t understand about privacy policy,” Stuart said.
Understanding identity is especially important for CMOs who need to meet compliance requirements and respect their customers’ data.
The 80 identity solutions providers come from various backgrounds.
Besides the Google-Facebook-Amazon triopoly, the list includes media companies with proprietary identifiers (NBCUniversal, NewsPass ID), DSPs, SSPs, agency-owned data companies (Publicis’ Epsilon, Merkle’s Merkury), TV manufacturers (Vizio, Samsung) and even payment processors (Visa). “Pure plays” whose business is solely identity resolution, like LiveRamp and ID5, also made the list.
“It shows that the world is a lot broader than people think, beyond UID, LiveRamp and Google,” said Matt Prohaska, founder of Prohaska Consulting.
The list also includes 11 contextual providers. “Contextual targeting is an identity – if I identify as a sports enthusiast, you can target me contextually that way,” Prohaska said.
The 80 companies on this list aren’t necessarily future-proofed for the end of the third-party cookie. Some use cookies heavily today, and it will be up to marketers to test and learn with them and question them about their plans for the future.
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“[Identity] is so complicated,” Stuart said. “We have to start bringing this to light, and bringing people together to solve a common problem.”
The full list is below:
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