Identity resolution + customer data platforms

This week martech vendors unveiled two more data alliances that contribute to a trend we’ve been seeing take hold — identity resolution (IR) solutions are becoming essential elements of customer data platforms (CDPs). Dentsu, the parent company of Merkle, announced this week that the agency’s Merkury IR capabilities will now be available within the Salesforce CDP. Separately, Neustar’s Unified Identity solution has been integrated with the ActionIQ CDP.

These integrations are just the latest in a long string of such partnerships. Neustar already integrates with Treasure Data’s CDP and Quaero, while Merkury has a technology partnership with Adobe. Meanwhile, Infutor (IR) has partnered with Amperity (CDP) and this is, by no means, an exhaustive list. In fact, when we released our latest MarTech Intelligence Report on CDPs, every one of 23 profiled vendors boasted of identity resolution capabilities — either built-in or through partnerships.

What it means to resolve identities online is changing all the time, however. With the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, along with other changes that impact how easily marketers can access third-party data, it’s more important than ever to keep up with the changing landscape — and no one has more incentive to do that than identity resolution providers, given that it’s their main focus.

What does all of this mean? Will identity resolution become one essential function of a CDP? Will it be built into media buying, attribution or other solutions? And if these integrations become table stakes, will marketers be able to access any identity resolution provider through their CDP, or will these relationships have some element of exclusivity?

Looking at the martech space as a whole, we’re seeing a lot of instances of so-called “headless” martech, and this is another. For example, many of the headless and hybrid content management systems (CMSs) we looked at in a recent report featured built-in digital asset management (DAM) systems. And those CMSs, in turn, were often considered part of a larger digital experience platform (DXP). Some have even speculated that CDPs will eventually be subsumed into other solutions.

Why we care. All of these developments mean marketers have more choices than ever when putting together their martech stack. This is positive in that it means marketers can select best-of-breed solutions, and that they have a lot of options in how to assemble their operation. That said, it’s already difficult enough to make choices when there are industry-accepted ways of tying together technologies.

Find out more by downloading our MarTech Intelligence Reports on Identity Resolution Platforms, Customer Data Platforms and Headless and Hybrid CMSs. You’ll discover analysis of each space along with detailed vendor profiles in each category.