Identity-based marketing: Goodbye and good riddance
The crumbling away of the cookie, and the inherent problems of digital identifiers, are well understood by even the most junior marketer. To so many in our space, this represents a catastrophe. But the truth is, thanks to AI, it is the most liberating development in marketing in 25 years.
Let’s set aside the ethical considerations of cookies, the mistrust consumers feel about them and the brand risk associated with using them. On a purely practical level, tying marketing to consumers is inherently limiting. Marketing should not be about identifying which individuals might buy a product; instead, the goal has always been to better understand why a product is itself interesting.
Diamonds are interesting because they are rare and valuable. With this knowledge, we no longer limit ourselves to finding and targeting consumer profiles that are expensive to buy and growing increasingly hard to scale. Instead, we learn how to position our product or service to anyone who might find value in what is being offered. When we define our target based on who, we get more of the same whos; when we define based on why, we get all the whos that share the same why.
This removes, at a stroke, many frustrations and limitations, including the need to compete for a limited group of profiles that drive up the cost of their eyeballs. It moves us instantly past the limitations of having to rely on any-party data. It opens up entirely new audiences to be quickly identified, located and communicated with. And it respects consumer privacy.
Though AI moves us past the age of simple demographic-based marketing, it nonetheless can be trained to understand this very data. Each concept identified by AI can be understood in terms of the people likely to find value in that concept—and we find that, just as brands are defined by concepts, so are people, with additional important and incisive insights to discover.
Ultimately, then, we have come full circle with marketing. For 25 years, the promise of digital marketing has been tying impressions back to interested individuals. Now we can ascend above that plateau. And it’s hard not to appreciate the irony of artificial intelligence being what returns marketing to its most human essence.
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