The new realities of identity are forcing marketers to rethink practices that have been in place for over 20 years. Industry, regulatory, and technology trends are fundamentally shifting the way that data is permissioned, accessed, and used for marketing purposes. These changes are driven by consumer demand for more transparency around how their data is collected, used, and managed.

However, marketers must answer the call. The industry has an opportunity to build a more effective advertising framework that puts consumers and data privacy at the center. Marketers can still deliver personalized experiences and delight customers, but they must look at new and innovative approaches.

How do we do that? Where do we start? To answer these questions, Tapad, a part of Experian, commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current state of customer data-driven marketing.

Forrester recently surveyed 314 global decision-makers at brands and agencies. The key takeaways are:

• More than 70% of study participants stated that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies, fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand.
• Two-thirds agreed that data deprecation, including tighter restrictions on data use (66%), and operating system and browser changes that impact third-party cookies (68%), make legacy marketing strategies unlikely to remain viable in the long term.
• 62% of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have either a significant (40%) or critical (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years.

Marketers and advertisers need innovative ways to enhance their first-party data with clarity and resiliency in order to smoothly sail to the next era of data-driven marketing.

While marketers have several options, one way brands can address this identity crisis is by encouraging safe data collaboration with other parties. Data clean rooms create safe spaces to enhance and expand consumer data knowledge. But new technology—especially when it involves sharing customer data—necessitates skepticism and due diligence.

By never revealing individual-level detail to either data owner, clean rooms enable collaboration while preserving privacy and data rights. Identity protection in this space must protect against re-identification, even at a segment level. This type of secure collaboration is where Experian’s expertise comes in.

Experian started building secure clean room-like solutions years ago in the highly regulated financial services space. Stringent privacy standards in this realm stress tested and forged a solid sanctuary for independent parties to share data assets.

Now, we’re adapting to address today’s marketing industry challenges by introducing Experian Sanctuary™, an optimized permissioned data collaboration workspace for advanced analytics and audience activation.

—Scott Kozub, VP, Product Marketing, Experian Marketing Services