The identity race heats up (again): Friday’s daily brief

Good morning, Marketers, I hope you had a good Earth Day, yesterday.

Below, we found a study that suggests environmental messaging might be the biggest miss in the world of marketing. What is your organization saying about the health of Planet Earth? What steps toward sustainability is your organization taking? Your customers are listening.

With vaccines rolling out, help is on the way for making humans healthier, too. I received my first shot of Moderna last week. It was an easy step to take, with an efficient operation and compassionate medical staff at the Ford Foundation in midtown Manhattan.

To prepare for unknown pandemic challenges, some companies (even smaller SMBs), took relatively simple steps in the lead-up. I interviewed SIGMA Equipment’s Lead of their Appraisal division, Randa Doleh, and her company’s story took me back to 2020. They had no idea, when they began searching for a suitable CRM in 2019, that people across the country would be stockpiling food in such a way that demand for food packaging machinery (which they resell) would skyrocket.

Chris Wood,

Editor

An SMB’s CRM journey during the pandemic

Indiana-based equipment reseller SIGMA Equipment implemented a new CRM during the pandemic. SIGMA Equipment began as Sigma Packaging and has continued to serve manufacturers primarily with the buying and selling of packaging and processing machines in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, health and beauty and consumer goods industries.

The implementation of the CRM from Insightly came at a time when SIGMA Equipment was experiencing significant change in the needs of manufacturers during the pandemic, as well as internal organizational change.

According to the lead for the Appraisal Division, Randa Doleh, the marketing software prior to the new CRM had been developed internally.

“Given our rate of growth, we couldn’t continue to rely on the current software,” said Doleh. “We needed a scalable solution.”

She said that she was “impressed with the flexibility that came with the Insightly CRM, out-of-the-box.” It enabled divisions within the organization to develop customized solutions while also being connected. This allowed for more strategic decisions to be made when it came to serving customers and managing the growth.

“The main use for the CRM is for departments to communicate with customers,” Doleh said. “This spans across multiple divisions, and we all need a full view of the customer.”

Having this full view of the customer available to multiple teams also opens up strategic opportunities across departments. “If I’m in a meeting with our sales team, I’m allowed to take a step back and see what other divisions can benefit, which means we’re really able to scale our output,” Doleh stated.

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The identity resolution race heats up (again)

With third-party cookies going away, the identifier space — alternative ways of finding and addressing consumers — is the scene of intense activity. Here are the latest moves:

Infutor and Unified ID 2.0. Infutor, the first-party data-based consumer identity resolution and management platform has announced it is joining the Unified ID 2.0 eco-system. This universal identifier was developed by The Trade Desk but will be managed by open source ad auction solution Prebid.org. 

Infutor VP of Strategy Todd Schoenherr told us: “Infutor is appending data from Unified ID 2.0 and has already added Unified ID 2.0 ids to its graph of over 266 million individuals and 120 US households. Infutor clients will be able to populate audiences within The Trade Desk for activation, and Infutor data will be available in The Trade Desk for use in campaigns.”

InMobi: The in-app advertising platform has launched its own solution for in-app mobile identity, UnifID (pronounced “unified”). Designed to help app publishers make their advertising inventory more addressable and thus higher value, UnifID will work as a standalone solution or in combination with other identifiers.

Publishers will be able to send first-party data-based audiences upstream to DSPs to attract media buys. They will also be able to integrate data from LiveRamp’s ATS, ID5 (see below) and Britepool.

Mediavine and ID5. Mediavine, the full-service ad management platform, will be partnering with ID5, an identity solution for digital advertising. Mediavine’s Grow.me is an audience engagement framework which helps large numbers of small publishers collect and manage first-party audience data. ID5 aims to provide a stable, consented and encrypted first-party data-based user ID.

The partnership will extend the reach of publishers beyond their own, authenticated audiences. This will enable both deterministic and probabilistic targeting.

Why we care. There’s an irony in this explosion of competitive activity to establish universal identifiers. One might ask, if these identifiers are universal, why do we need so many of them? Also, we’d love to see a little more variety in the names. “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth,” said Persian religious leader Baháʼu’lláh. Or the whole addressable audience anyway.

 Are brands too modest about climate messaging?  

Yesterday was Earth Day, as good a time as any to ask what brands are doing to communicate to their audience about climate change. The creative analytics platform CreativeX examined some 280,000 global ads to find out what brands are saying about climate change, and how their messaging varies by region. Although over 80% of respondents to a Global Consumer Confidence Survey, across age and gender, felt strongly that brands should help improve the environment, only 2% of the ads analyzed by CreativeX referred to positive climate initiatives.

Some brands do see a need to spread positive messages. The automotive industry, for example, is keen to talk about reduced emissions and electric vehicles. It leads industries in climate-related ad content, followed by fashion. EMEA led regions with 3.7% of ads addressing climate-related topics, with France leading the region. Latin America had the lowest percentage, even though consumers are as deeply invested in environmental protection in that region as consumers in Europe.

Why we care. Hopefully it’s obvious why we care about the environment. But from a marketing perspective, it’s astonishing that brands are essentially leaving consumer good will on the table — in contrast to a very evident focus on diversity and inclusion in today’s ad strategies.

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Quote of the Day

“Conspiracy theory: Big Tech intentionally makes auto-correct suck to reduce fear over artificial intelligence.” Ari Paparo, CEO and co-founder, Beeswax