Why identity resolution is necessary in behavioral marketing
It’s probably obvious to anyone interested in identity resolution that it has some important applications to both business and national security. From employee screening and loss prevention to IT security to Homeland Security, there are lots of reasons an organization would want to resolve identities over potentially complicated data sources. But what about all the recent talk about so-called “micro-targeting” or “behavioral marketing?”
At its best, it’s basically the collection of identity data for the purpose of highly-specialized messaging. At its worst, it’s - well - the collection of identity data for the purpose of highly-specialized messaging. Still, nobody really seems to be talking about the fact that without the right software in place, the data being collected is less likely to produce much of a return and more likely to create significant security risks.
Thus far this year, advertisers have dropped about $575 million into behavioral advertising, and that figure is expected to rise to $1 billion or so next year, according to information on Marketing Vox.
Some of that money is spent on contextual modeling like Yahoo’s SmartAds, which Yahoo’s senior vice president of display marketplaces, Todd Teresi, says will create “scaleable one-to-one marketing” (from the New York Times). In a post on his Web Analysis blog Anil Batra argues that “this will allow Yahoo to build [a] richer set of data” that will lead to higher conversion rates.
All of that seems great for increasing revenue, but it seems like identity resolution should be an integral part of this process as well. Without intelligent systems in place to create what Infoglide Chief Software Architect John Ripley recently called a “living context,” what you’ve got is a huge data store with tons of identity data but without any built-in accuracy or privacy protection, especially since the data’s purpose suggests a great deal of sharing.
Putting it another way, HP Labs researcher Marco Casassa Mont says that identity management and sharing, especially from “an Identity Provider to a Service Provider or between two Identity Providers,” has to have both data and protection policies in place. He says that those policies have to:
- Enable users to provide their (privacy) preferences in a more explicitly and fine grained way (e.g. in terms of consent, disclosure list, deletion, notification, etc.);
- Enable enterprise back-end Identity Management solutions to manage the association of preferences and (data handling) policies to data and keep them into account during data processing steps;
- Enable the exchange of data along with associated preferences/policies;
- Introduce accountability, tracing and auditing mechanisms.
Lots of people are saying that the identity data collection of behavioral marketing is going to produce incredible results for everyone from retail organizations to political campaigns (as an article on MSNBC.com points out). However, while there is a rush to get data collection and resolution solutions deployed, nobody seems to be asking if those solutions are working hard enough to protect privacy or even accurately navigate the vast stores of identity data being collected.
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