The LUMAscape has for years provided the most elegant map that can be drawn for an industry as complex as our own. The cluster of logos is a fitting snapshot of a space that has perhaps grown a bit too complex and fragmented for its own good—especially in contrast to the viable and vastly more simplified solutions offered by Google and Facebook.
In an interview with AdExchanger, Gartner’s Martin Kihn hinted at what a more concise model of our industry and its value proposition to brands might render. “Ad tech and mar tech are parallel universes, but they have points of convergence. And the big point is around identity; the marketing record,” he said. “The real core is identity, and it’s not just device mapping. It’s getting a deep picture of an individual, and being able to recognize that person.”
As soon as you step outside of the intramural debates of the ad tech universe and start speaking to businesses about their real challenges, you realize this isn’t as revelatory as it sounds. Every brand wants to understand its customers better, and every brand wants to know how it can serve them better. It’s really quite simple. From a brand’s perspective, the ‘why’ of ad tech and mar tech is all about ownership and competitive advantage; brands want to own a 360-degree understanding of their customers, and they will need to own it in order to survive intensifying competition and disruption from the likes of Amazon. The ability to identify customers across platforms underlies that fundamental objective.
Amazon knows it’s true. “We can see the entire customer-decision journey, and that’s what’s unique,” said Seth Dallaire, Amazon’s head of global ad sales and marketing, in an interview with The New York Times. The companies threatened by Amazon (retailers, grocers, not to mention Hollywood, etc.) are realizing that their competitiveness depends on controlling their own customer journey, and an identity solution is essential to achieve that.
It’s no wonder that identity is emerging as the gravitational center of marketing—“the core.” For a long time, identity was the absent center driving marketing inefficiency. Marketers had to rely on segments and demography to guesstimate their customers, but today they can be reached deterministically as the singular individuals they really are. That’s one of the major value-adds that the entirety of ad tech and mar tech brings to the enterprise. To anyone not in our own space, it’s a huge part of what we do.
How do you draw “the core”—identity—on a map? It’s not as though you could insert it as a category alongside all the others. Bodies such the IAB have recently acknowledged that the work of establishing a consumer’s identity belongs in multiple categories at once: “mobile app deep-linking providers, cross-platform data onboarding firms, deterministic and probabilistic audience and device graph solutions providers, data enrichment firms and mobile and cross-device ad tech firms” all belong in the mix.
Identity is not a distinct category from all the others—it is more of a super-category which includes several of the existing ones, transcending them and superseding them. Separating identity from the rest of ad tech and mar tech is pointless, because the central point of ad tech and mar tech is identity.
So, why not draw a bigger circle for identity, and lump others into it? Onboarding solutions, DMPs and cross-device ID companies would all get thrown in the mix, making for an awkward map with lots of redundancies. But the real reason why isn’t just visual awkwardness—it’s the misalignment with purpose. As long as brands think about identity in terms of siloed, fragmented categories, they will get a siloed and fragmented approach of siloed and fragmented solutions. That’s exactly what brands today are working to overcome.
Perhaps instead of creating identity as a new category alongside the others, it’s time to sunset a few of the old categories that spoke more to the point solution and less to the ultimate objective. Identity is bigger than those categories—and maybe bigger than the map itself.
