Neustar-Quaero Partnership Solves the CDP Identity Challenge
Marketers are inundated with new technologies. Discerning ones among them realize even when tech solves some problems, it requires sound research and evaluation before businesses invest time, money and brainpower to implement it.
And so it goes with customer data platforms (CDPs). The CDP market has skyrocketed with substantial momentum. Fourteen new CDP vendors joined an already-packed market in the second half of 2019, according to the Customer Data Platform Institute. Industry interest has led to funding for CDP startups, and the inevitable predictions that sector consolidation is on the horizon.
Skepticism Surrounding CDPs
But there is a lot of skepticism surrounding CDPs. Some companies have experienced lackluster performance that makes them question whether CDPs offer substantial value. Others have seen little proof of the customer engagement benefits CDPs promise. In the end, many marketers who adopt CDPs find themselves lacking the holistic and clear consumer view that drove them to buy the platform in the first place.
So, are CDPs just another repackaged flavor of martech alphabet soup?
Analysts have expressed reservations about the value of CDPs for two years now. Forrester's Joe Stanhope and Stephanie Lui in a 2018 report wrote, “Identity resolution lies at the heart of customer-centric marketing and makes or breaks a CDP’s legitimacy and effectiveness.
I couldn't agree more. While CDPs are really good at aggregating massive amounts of data from many sources, identity resolution remains a significant gap in the common CDP process.
Most CDPs ingest, normalize and unify customer profile data, stitching together those disparate pieces of information. Some CDPs also perform customer segmentation and activate that data for personalized omnichannel marketing campaigns. And, yes, some can also perform campaign measurement and analytics functions.
But merely stitching together questionable data does nothing to clean it up, de-duplicate it, verify it, or fill in data gaps. And even the way many CDP vendors define identity resolution is...shall we say...loose. It's common to hear a CDP vendor define identity as newly-ingested data paired with first-party CRM data plus online data. But true identity resolution requires validation and the assured accuracy of offline-to-online connections. Without those steps, it’s just not identity resolution.
Why Quaero Chose Neustar to Improve CDP Identity Resolution
This isn't to say CDPs don't have lots of benefits. They do! So, adding true identity resolution capabilities to the CDP process significantly improves the CDP process in ways not possible until now. It's why Quaero, a CDP that manages billions of customer records for brands like Disney, Bayer, and PayPal, recognized the need for advanced identity resolution technology to perfect its process.
Quaero has partnered with Neustar for verified people-based data to improve the quality and accuracy of its clients’ customer data, both on- and offline. Now the company knows its clients have true identity resolution with an accurate and complete view of people across otherwise-fragmented digital and offline devices and channels.
Think of Neustar as the middle customer identity layer sandwiched inside Quaero’s CDP process. First, Quaero ingests, integrates, and normalizes customer data. Then they unify customer profiles.
Neustar comes in next, verifying data accuracy and enriching customer records with updated contact information, demographics and behavioral attributes. Neustar also transform offline customer data into addressable online audiences for cross-digital advertising.
The CDP process picks back up, enabling real-time customer segmentation, personalized marketing activations, and measurement.
By combining a real identity resolution technology with the Quaero CDP, marketers get the benefits of customer data ingestion, unification, and management while fixing identity flaws and filling gaps that other CDPs miss.
How One Brand Activated on a CDP with True Identity
A big quick-serve restaurant with a CDP recently worked with Neustar to clean up faulty profiles and duplicate information that was costing them a lot of money. With genuine identity resolution plus their CDP, the brand saved $228,000 in a multi-channel marketing campaign.
One thing the brand discovered is that without true identity resolution, the CDP process alone couldn’t maintain identity data properly. And it couldn't resolve for several profiles and pieces of data belonging to the same person.
Just think: there are all sorts of identifiers attached to individuals. They have multiple connected devices, change their home addresses, or get new jobs with new emails. But within two years, 60% of that information is often out of date. That’s a lot!
Plus, over the years people generate new digital and offline personas with new identifiers. CDPs alone just can’t keep up or make sense of this complex identity puzzle. Without determining the validity of email addresses, names or other identifiers, a CDP might not recognize when several pieces of data belong to the same person.
So when a brand segments audiences, it could risk segmenting for three, four or five different identities when in actuality they belong to just one person. Or, it might mismatch all that data it ingests. Email addresses, online events and transactional data from other people or bots could be added to the wrong profiles.
And without valid identity resolution, most CDPs might activate on faulty information, too. That could mean delivering ads or sending customer offers based on data that has no relevance to the user. In other words, brands using CDPs alone could be getting better at putting bad money into the marketplace.
By combining Neustar’s identity resolution with their CDP, the restaurant brand weeded out erroneous profiles that were created when newly-added identifiers generated false personas, rather than appending correctly to existing ones. This powerful combo helped them boost reach to more actual people by 30%.
Neustar + Quaero Filled Data Gaps and Improved Marketing Efficiency
Connecting with Neustar, Quaero can fill data gaps for large enterprise clients, too. For example, when Neustar and Quaero processed data on thousands of US customers for a large client, Neustar was able to correct 72% of addresses and found 72% more emails associated with matched customer identities.
CDPs do not add insights to customer profiles either. In the same customer dataset, Neustar was able to enrich 86% of matched user profiles with household, behavioral, and demographic insights. By layering in customer attributes and insights, Neustar and Quaero gave the client a better understanding of its customers. That can drive better performance results for marketers.
Neustar is already increasing the value of CDP investments for marketers through identity resolution, more efficient marketing spend, and data enrichment. Our partnership with Quaero will help marketers experience the benefits of CDPs with the confidence true identity resolution brings.
We look forward to improving the CDP experience through identity resolution for more marketers!
