Practical Tips for First-Party Data and Identity Resolution with Jeremy Katz

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals. Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career. Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo today. We'll get Naomi and/or Mike back soon, I'm sure. And I know Mike is getting ready for Spring Fling 2025 coming up in a little over a month. So if you haven't already done that, go check it out and sign up if you can go. But joining me today is Jeremy Katz. Jeremy is currently SVP of Product Solutions, Identity and Data at Merkle. Jeremy is a data analytics and marketing technology leader with 15+ years of experience delivering value and building high-performing teams. He is skilled at solving complex challenges at the intersection of technology, strategy, and storytelling. His background spans digital marketing leadership and ad tech/martech across multiple organizations prior to joining Merkle. So Jeremy, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Yeah, this is going to be fun. you know, topic is kind of in the realm of first-party data and things like that that we're gonna focus on. But before we get into that, I'd love for you to, 'cause you have an interesting, as I would say is the case for most of our guests, right? An interesting career journey. And you recently joined Merkle, which is, for those who don't know, a large consultancy agency. But prior to that, you spent most of your working career in-house at brands. So why don't you maybe walk through a little more of your career And how, yeah, what led to you joining Merkle? And while you're doing that, this is something we didn't plan for, but I typically throw this in there. Like, I would love to know if there were any sort of key pivotal moments, decisions you had to make that led you one way or another, or key people, right, who played an outsized role in your career trajectory.

Yeah, great. And That could be one of two ways, right? It could be somebody who I learned from and learned what to emulate, or it could be things I learned to— mistakes I learned not to repeat as I got—

Absolutely. Things I don't want to do, things I will not do when I'm in that position kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. So I started my career sort of where many people in data and analytics start, as an English and journalism major. That's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I— when I came into, you know, the corporate world, I was really trying to find where do I add value. And I had a background in journalism and English, and I ended up starting in communications. So communications sort of quickly turned into marketing, and I worked in a lot of marketing roles and digital marketing roles early on in my career. And a lot of it was getting thrown in the fire. So, you know, for example, hey, do you want to learn how to run an email program? I'm like, sure, I can't code HTML. I don't know how to do any of that, but I'll learn. So I got thrown in the mix a lot early on. And yeah, I mean, you talk about pivotal moments. My first job, my boss quit 2 weeks in. So all of a sudden I was leading, you know, marketing for North America at UTC, United Technologies in Connecticut, and doing PR, marketing, you know, all kinds of stuff that I was not really ready for. But I don't know if you're ready for a lot of things early in your career. You got to learn as you go. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, learning this marketing as a practitioner and marketing automation, I'm not sure we even called it back then, but a lot of it was—

Hey, e-marketing when I was doing it.

Yeah. E-marketing, website marketing, right? A lot of terms that are no longer being used. I was able to kind of, like I say, hop from channel to channel and really kind of start putting a picture together of how these things worked in harmony. And, you know, eventually I ended up moving into the exciting world of insurance, which I actually say is a lot— is very interesting when you get into it. But from the outside, it can be a little dry. And when I did that, I eventually moved into sort of more of a support role, I would call it, at the center of the organization. So now, you know, all my customers were marketers like I had been up to that point. And We had basically built out sort of a centralized martech function at that time. And but I kind of stumbled into that, I would say. I've always been interested in the technology aspects and kind of how things work. And it was back in the day when the martech conference, there was one in Boston, used to be in person. They're all digital now. But back then it was in person.

Well, not all of them. I mean, MAFS Blues is not.

So that's right. There you go. But I had gone to that conference and just pulled together some slides. And I came back to my, my CMO, she wanted to know what I learned and I said, well, there's a thing called a CDP. I'm not sure if you've heard about it, but it's kind of a big deal. It's growing. And eventually that led me into the role to build a martech team, onboard a CDP in the organization. And so a lot of my career has been luck and timing, but always being ready, always staying hungry and learning and trying new things. And ultimately I think that's kind of what led me to Merkle. I've gone to data and analytics, you know, sort of by accident, not by accident, but, you know, as my path has taken me. And, you know, I decided to kind of challenge, take on a new challenge, sort of reinvent myself and sit in a different perspective yet again, which is now I get to work with, you know, companies and clients across many different verticals. And I'm learning a ton again. I feel like I'm like almost back at the beginning of my career in some ways with the amount of learning that's happening. But Yeah, I'm excited at what I'm doing. And I feel like if you're not learning and if you're sort of not progressing forward, you're falling behind, especially in this climate today. So yeah, that's kind of a quick snapshot.

So you mentioned you did communications and then into marketing. And so I'm always curious. So I have my idea of like when I think about communications versus marketing, what it is, but what is it like? How do you differentiate those?

Well, I have a very direct take of how I got into, I would say, communications, which was, you know, I used to write articles for newspapers back when they were printed on paper and delivered on paper. And I remember creating articles, 600-word articles, investigative sort of journalism in nature. And I remember I got like $100 an article or something like that. And they asked me, would you want to do like work for a business profile? And I think I got paid like 3x the amount for the business profile. And I was like, oh, okay, this is a way to take my journalism skills and maybe apply it for companies. And so my first job, I actually brought a portfolio of my articles in that I had written at the time. And they're like, oh, well, you can write for our internal company blog. And they actually created an internal social media site at the time. So I was kind of like taking the same skillset. And I would call that more like internal comms. Which led into PR and then supporting our leadership team too. So that's kind of how I think about the communications aspect, but—

Okay, that's kind of how I do too. I just, I was like, it's like internal communications, PR, IR, executive presentations and things like that, right? Okay, yeah, yeah, that's as opposed to marketing, which is more customer, like directly customer-focused in general, right? Whether it's demand gen or you're doing sales enablement or product marketing.

Yep. Okay, interesting.

So my guess is you're the guy who, when you were an English major, that you liked diagramming sentences because you like the structure.

Oh, I got to nerd out on diagramming sentences. I still would. I don't do it anymore, but yeah, I love diagramming sentences. I like breaking down things to their essence and putting them together and seeing how they work.

So same thing with words. See, it's so funny because I'm the engineer here in this call and I'm a data guy. And I nearly failed out of 7th grade English because I just like, this diagramming sentence thing is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. And I like, I, I did the bare minimum. Like I literally, I think it's the worst grade I've had all my entire life. I really was very close to failing that class. So, um, so irony there, you know, the data nerd, the guy who likes structure is the one who didn't want to diagram sentences. All right, so you mentioned that you've been doing a lot with data and analytics, and recently in your career, you've been spending time with first-party data identity resolution, and you mentioned CDPs.

Mm-hmm.

So yeah, we've had guests on and have talked about CDPs, and we've had guests on talk about first-party data. I don't think we've talked to anyone about identity resolution, but maybe Why don't we start with what are your working definitions of those? And if there's any other terms that are relevant for our conversation, like what's the working definition of those and how are they related and different?

Sure. Yeah. And I think, you know, first-party data is probably one of the easier places to start. You know, it's data that you're collecting, you own, and it could be current customers, it could be, you know, prospects who fill out a form on your site but don't convert, but it's data that you've collected as an organization. You have the rights to that data, you own it, and you can leverage that for acquisition, for cross-sell, upsell, etc., versus like a second party where it's a partner sharing their data with you, or a third party where maybe you're buying or renting data that you can use to decorate, we call it, that first-party data.

Decorate, okay.

Which, you know, it's an old-school term maybe a little bit, but I still like the term decorate. It makes it sound fancy, I guess. But ID resolution to me is there's all these pieces of information around who you are. I'll use myself as an example. I live in Chicago. I live in an apartment building, so I have an address associated with that building. I've got my name and my first name and last name on my postal box downstairs. I've got an email address that I use, a Gmail address, and I've got some Yahoo stuff I use for fantasy football, old email addresses. I have all these pieces of information, you know, call it terrestrially, you know, me as a person that lives in an address.

Sure.

And then I go on the internet at my house and I have an IP address, you know, the user agent pings against my device, it knows my device ID, all these digital fragments and pieces of information out there. And to me, the resolution or the resolving piece is understanding that all that belongs to Jeremy Katz. And bring that down to a single identity, right? And usually that's through an identity graph, which is looking at the relationship between all those things. And I would say like the distance between those points, the stronger they are, it's a shorter distance. So it's funny because like my email address is the same for the last 20-plus years, the one I use, you know, every day.

Sure.

My address has changed 3 times in the last 5 years. So You know, it depends on which piece of information is updated and how frequently it's updated. But understanding who people are is really the foundation of identity resolution. And usually you're engaging a, you know, an outside organization to do that. And that's sort of what we do in my current role. There's a number of companies that do parts of that. Okay. So now to—

Is that— so yeah, I think we talked about this, like my where I cut my teeth in the marketing domain was database marketing, and I was building— I built a 50 million household database, and the whole concept of householding was, um, what was new to me at the time. It's mostly a consumer-oriented kind of idea, but is it— is that related to this, or is it just a separate thing altogether, or how's that fit in?

That's a good question. I think, you know, entity resolution is the broader domain identity resolutions contained within the entity.

Okay.

We think about grains, and I'll try not to get too nerdy too quickly here, but grains of data. Me as an individual, I roll up to a household and it's even more complex than that. I mentioned living in an apartment building. We have the family household, the TV household that I have inside my walls here, and then I live in a unit, a physical unit. All of that is a grain that goes up from me as an individual. And it's same on the B2B side, right? Like you work at a company, that's an entity. You have a role within that company and you probably have a business profile. That's the stuff that your business email, you're going on LinkedIn, your LinkedIn account has business content on it. So it's like those different grains. I think about them as like the whole, the old school grandparent-parent-child relationship when you think about it. No, it could be one-to-many, it could be, you know, one-to-one, but those grains are kind of what we talk about in that entity resolution space.

Interesting. And my guess is some of this gets out into the, for lack of a better term, dark web, because it's funny because like literally, maybe today, maybe today or yesterday, I got an email that was sent to, for like one email but was sent to 4 different email addresses that are all linked to me.

Hmm.

2 of which I don't really use. Um, I think one was from my, you know, my, my, where I graduated college from. And one was what, like an old Hotmail account that I don't really use anymore. Like, and it was weird. I was like, what? Like, so I was like, oh, somebody somehow found all this stuff about me. And I promptly deleted it because I was like, eh. This is probably not somebody I want to be dealing with if they're going out there and scraping stuff that's out there like that. So, okay. So that all makes sense. I see the connection to my database marketing days when I was building households. I get the— I actually think the complexities for B2B are more significant. Because of the complexity. Like, you left out one bit, which is, you know, not only are you part of an organization, but maybe you're part of a specific business unit or a location, right? And if they have multiple locations or multiple business units, I even worked for one company where one person could be— we had sort of separate— this goes down to CRM, right? We had separate accounts for different, almost like not quite team level, but kind of like team levels for specific things. We sell this product to this group and this other product product to this other group. And sometimes somebody could be in more than one place, so we'd have like intentional duplicates too. So you're dealing with all that kind of noise. So when, maybe before we get into what you're doing now, but like when you were in-house, how do you have any projects? Like give me an example of how this concept of these different things and how this, like how did that get happen? What were some of the big challenges? And then how was that— I guess this is a technology solution at the end of the day, right? Just bringing this stuff together. How did that, like, how did that get leveraged to help the business?

Yeah, and I'll try to tie it back to the CDP example too, because I think that's where I first really got deep into this. You know, we actually created, you know, for all intents and purposes, a customer database, you know, to start here. And it was called Customer Hub. That Customer Hub, if you will, had sort of multiple lines of business, All the information we had on our customers brought into one physical— at the time it was an on-premise database— one place. Now, when you do that, even inside an organization, you may have a customer that sits in 2 business lines, to your point, that may have bought 2 different products. So we didn't even try to resolve it at first. We just brought it all together. And we said, okay, you know, Michael Hartman has 3 email addresses. What's the best one to use? If he's given us 3 email addresses, what's the one that he usually transacts with us on? And so I think that was the first foray, was kind of building an internal asset that we could use for customer information across our organization. The uses of that are relatively straightforward, right? Like, I want to send you mail or I want to send you an email. You shouldn't have the experience you had where you get, you know, 3 emails sent to your different email addresses as if you're a different person on each one. So I think there were some really basic use cases to start. And then when you bring a CDP on top of that, it's like, how do you ingest all of that? And some light resolution happens in a CDP. It's all your first-party data, but then that goes out to multiple channels. So that might go out to email, site personalization, et cetera. And you're able to know it's one person you're orchestrating from a central place and then distributing that out. across multiple channels. So I know CDPs have evolved quite a bit since the early days. Almost everything is called a CDP now and it's very different.

I was gonna laugh. I was trying not to laugh when you said CDPs, you know, old school, because like they haven't really been around that long, right?

Yeah, in the grand scheme of things.

Like 5, maybe 10 years?

Yeah, it feels like in the digital marketing data tech space, that's like somehow way longer.

Yeah.

So, but being able to tie those things together really helped me understand all the components. And then, you know, then the question was, all right, you've got all your customer data together, you've got a CDP, you're able to market to people. What about your website? What about all the different experiences happening in your website? And we at the time, I think we had like 4 or 5 different portals for different parts of the business with different logins. And I mean, just making sense of that.

Yeah.

is a relatively complex challenge. But then, you know, at the end of the day, you've got data coming in and you've gotta figure out how to make it all connect. And I think that's ultimately where it started going deeper into identity resolution and digital signals and like bringing that all back to the same profile.

Right, right.

And it's a never-ending battle, right, to get that right.

Sure. Okay, so, I have a couple questions. So on the, like you brought all this stuff back together in CDP and you mentioned pushing it out. I think you said pushing it, like I'm paraphrasing, pushing it back out to some of the maybe frontline systems, right? Whether it's CRM or—

Mm-hmm.

Was it being used to maybe inform transactional stuff? So, hey, I'm a salesperson, I can see this activity of key people at my account. And you have that, you know, as something they inform, like if I have to make a call or send an email, was it being used that way? Or was it like, was it being used for say website personalization or, you know, targeting with social based on whether it's lookalikes or whatever? Like how was it, how was that used once that you did that kind of brought everything together? Yeah.

And that was the fun part. for me, being a marketer and knowing what everyone wanted to do across the org. And I think I had 180 use cases to start that I had to prioritize and, you know, knock some off that list.

Wow.

So one of the cool things we did was we used a different service for identifying people in the phone centers. So when somebody calls in, it would pop, you know, the phone number and get their profile started. So when you greet somebody, you know who they are. So we were really able to take that to a different level, improve the match rates, and improve the ability for our sales reps to be able to know who was calling in, and on the service side too. And then also kind of pop a little profile of that customer. What's their most recent 4 or 5 interactions? But there was a lot of things we did too. We were able to help with our survey programs for NPS programs just by kind of like bringing all that data together for the deployment of the survey.

So for our listeners and watchers, NPS, if you're not familiar, Net Promoter Score, Right.

So, yeah, a lot of acronyms in this space. Thanks for spelling that one out for me. And then, you know, COVID is actually a really good example of, you know, having to send an email out to your entire customer population a couple times.

Yeah.

Especially in the insurance space, you know, we actually— people weren't driving. All of a sudden, one day people are driving, the next day no one's driving. So a lot of companies like ours at the time gave back premium. at that time. So, we had to send a lot of communications to customers. And, it was timely because we had built this capability. We were able to be very precise in our mailings, understand who was getting emails, who was kind of more traditional paper-based, and be precise in how we mailed and communicated with our entire customer population. You're talking millions and millions of customers and—

Sure.

Relatively large company. And, it was Wasn't seamless, wasn't perfect, but it was pretty smooth based on what we had built. So just basic communication.

Yeah.

And it was also in here.

Wait, so this is, you're kind of hitting on some of the next part of follow-up I had, which is, um, I've been at different places, only one that I did try to do the exercise of defining the characteristics of this is a customer or this is a person. Like, what is the minimum? Like, how do we define that? Did you go through that kind of exercise of Having clear definitions about that. I'm just curious, how long did that take? And like, how did you— because I'm going to guess if you get enough people in the room, you get 10 people in, you're going to get 10 different opinions about what is a customer.

Yes.

Yeah, I joke all the time, like the hardest thing as a marketing ops person is when somebody comes to you and says, we need to send an email to all our customers.

Yeah.

Okay, what do you mean?

It seems like that should be an easier answer than it is.

It is, it is. It absolutely sounds like it should be a no-brainer, but it is not.

Yeah, so I guess I'll stick with the— because it's fresh in my mind, I'll stick with the insurance example. Independent insurance agents, are those our customers? The actual insureds that we, you know, support, are those customers? Non-customers who are engaged in an accident, with our customers, claimants.

Yeah.

There's roles for each of these things. And so I think like, you know, I tried to expand the definition of a customer to at least include anybody who is a current, we call them in-force customer, has a current policy with us, as well as anybody who we've interacted with, you know, in the last, we actually pulled 10 years of data in to start that we have information on. They're either a former customer, They quoted with us, they had some interaction with us, and we had them as a core customer. And then you kind of had the agents as a separate group. But think about all the attributes and interactions and roles you're now attaching to all those profiles. And that's where I think it's less just science. There's some art to it.

Yeah.

And getting all the business people in a room and making sure they can have their input into how you define those things. But ultimately, you got to keep it simple, right? It's got to still be usable. So, you can't have 55 versions of maybe a data element. You've got to try to keep it somewhat grouped logically so it's usable.

So, in my experience, I agree with you that we should keep it simple, but in my experience, what tends to happen is people keep thinking of— I don't even know that I would call them outlier cases, but take a small example, right? One of your customers over the lifetime of them being there, like at any point in time, They may be, you know, someone who's in the process of engaging with you. They're not currently a paying customer, or what'd you call enforced, right? Uh, then they become that, uh, they end up being a claimant in another case, like with someone else who's an enforced customer. Like, how, like, so it could easily go like, oh, well, this person at any point in time or in a given situation has a different status. Like, how do you, did you deal with that? Did you?

Oh yeah.

Okay. How did you go about getting to resolution on those kinds of seemingly simple but challenging questions?

Yeah, we actually had some really smart people on the data science side too who helped me. In fact, I think we actually got a patent on one of the data models that we built out. And it was really, it kind of brought together time as a constant, like place and time. The individual, who they are doesn't change as much, right? The attributes around them change, but who that person is doesn't change. And then some of the roles and the kind of like, you know, I won't get into all the detail, but the aspects around the data model. So you may be a customer at one point, a prospect at another point, a claimant. You could be an agent. You could be an independent agent selling our product and a customer. Sure. Yep. And so the ability to sort of build a flexible data model that reflected those changes over time is also important. And now there's a whole practice around customer journey analytics and understanding the customer journey. This is in the early stages of when that was kind of picking up. So that's kind of what led me into analytics is they're like, all right, now we want you to help build out that journey analytics perspective for our claims and operations area. So—

Sure.

Yeah, we dealt with that quite a bit. And I think it's not linear, right? It could change. It goes back and forth in between those situations. And To be honest, like, to this day, I still remember the most valuable customer segment in our prospecting was always former customers because they've seen you, they've engaged with you, they know you. So the response rates are always higher. So very interesting in how you think about, you know, the loop as opposed to like a linear, you know, flow of how people interact with you.

Yeah. And I wanted to drill down into those because I suspect Given what I know about the profile of our listeners and our audience, is there's going to be enough people who've probably never gone through this and would, if they were said, hey, let's go, we want to bring in a CDP, or we want to build a data warehouse or data lake that brings all our customer data together, it will be more complicated than you think it will be because of all these things that will come up in different I mean, customer is a great version or a great example of the kind of word that I talk about a lot with people where if you say that word and you're in a room of people, like everyone's hearing it from their own context and they're going to have an idea of what that means. And they may overlap with the person next to them or the other people in the room, but there's probably not 100% overlap. And yeah, you get that into a broader context of, you know, just within marketing, you probably don't have it. If you go marketing and customer support, or we go marketing and sales, and it starts to get really challenging to get to a decision on that. And so I'm with you. You want to keep it simple as much as you can. And that's the hard part is like, how do you deal with the trade-off between Trying to keep it simple, which probably also affects the ability of whatever technology you're using to handle volume and things like that, and then also affects usability, but also you want it to be as complete as you need for the use cases. It's not a small task, so I appreciate you sharing that.

Yeah, if I could opine for one second on CDP—

Please do, I just did.

A lot of them, it's like just load your data in and magically it'll all be cleaned up and you'll have perfect profiles. And that's something that I've learned through the pain of going through this. It's not that easy. You have to do some prep and get your data in order when you bring a tool like that. And that goes for any tool, right? That can go for a marketing automation platform too.

Sure.

There's upfront work that'll make your life a lot easier. And it's not the fun work sometimes, but it's the work that is gonna help you be successful. You know, at the next stage.

Well, I think this is— it falls into the category to some degree, it falls into the category of why I tell people like, don't go down the path of going from no reporting to say we're going to build a dashboard because you're going to— and also don't not do reporting because you think your data is not good. Like doing this work, like if you start making— taking steps at it, it's going to expose where there are issues and then you can go back and address them, right? Whether it's a process issue or a system issue or A people issue, and usually some combination. So, I want to make sure what I didn't hear from you is don't do the CDP thing until you get your data in order, because if you do that, you'll never do a CDP thing, which is fine. Take a step.

That's how you learn.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm a big believer, expose this stuff and it brings light on it, and then you can make improvements and it becomes a bit of a a flywheel, you can get a flywheel effect, right?

Yep.

You find a problem, you solve the problem, it gets better. You find the next problem, you solve it, you get, you know, and so I'm a big believer in that. And, you know, reporting CDPs probably fall into a similar category. Okay, so I wanna get back into this identity resolution stuff, 'cause something that you and I talked about as we were kind of getting ready for this is that You've now started work. I don't know, I can't remember if it was at Merkle or it was before where you were actually connecting professional profiles and personal profiles together about a person and somehow leveraging that. So a number of questions like, A, did I understand that right? And B, how does that generally work? And then C, are there any implications in terms of privacy or, you know, that kind of concerns there that you have to deal with when you're doing that?

Yeah, I'll try to take the first 2 and then the privacy one, we could talk a lot about that because obviously that's a challenge in a lot of components of this, even on the consumer side as well.

Sure.

And again, I mentioned earlier, I think about how I got exposed to a lot of things very early on in my career. And like the example I've already given, we had small business, medium businesses, consumer sort of All in the insurance space. We had all those different categories. So it was something that we had to— I had to understand relatively early. And it could be different partners you work with too. So it's not always just the case that you're going to work with somebody who's really good at the identity resolution for a consumer and the data for a consumer. You may have to work with a different company who's really good at the business side. And oftentimes they approach it from the other direction. So when I think of a consumer-based identity resolution, you're starting with people. You're starting with their personal profile, like I mentioned earlier, you know, all the information about me as an individual. On the business side, you get a lot of companies that are really good at understanding the company dimension first. So they kind of go in inverse. They go from, you know, what's this industry SIC code and what is the types of things they sell? And they kind of start with the company and then they ladder down to divisions and organizations at the top. decision-makers, and they kind of go that way down to the individual. I think the other thing I would just mention is it's not that hard if you think about a business email. Like, you don't have to be that smart to think about, if I know the format of a business email, is it firstname.lastname@company.com? It's relatively easy, probably, for a lot of people that are in the more in the sales space or B2B space to understand how to reach individuals in that company. The challenge is it's so ethereal. Like, your role could change, your company changes. So, like, the durability of that business email is not as powerful as, like, your physical address or your personal email. But it's the linkages that happen across both. I think LinkedIn is a great place, you know, as an example, right? Most people are on LinkedIn. They have their personal email address is how they sign up for the platform. But they have their company and they have information about their job, probably history of their jobs in that profile. So, I'm just going to use that example and think about how LinkedIn is also marketing to individuals and enabling advertisers to reach those individuals on platform. It's really based on those business characteristics. Once they go off platform, you're still marketing to people. So, that linkage of, like, say, email, your login information, that they're able to aggregate up, and that gets to the privacy piece, right? Usually it's done in an aggregated way. It's not in an individual way to build audience pools for targeting.

Sure.

And that connectivity is something that my current company does really well. And it's an interesting kind of approach, which is we have all this depth of knowledge on people. We've also built this secondary kind of view of businesses and business information. And now we're trying to bridge that gap. So we've connected on those elements, right? Those identification elements like a personal email and business email. But at the end of the day, it's about reaching those people with advertising or with messaging or with experiences. So it can get relatively complex based on the information you have. You could also have phone numbers, you could have business addresses, right? But it's a similar concept. It's just you're gonna get a smaller pool to start with. you're gonna actually get a drop from the personal information into the business side. So your quality is gonna be hopefully better, but your audience size is gonna shrink. And part of that is because of the nature of the identifiers. They're not as durable as the personal side.

Mm-hmm.

But I started touching on it a little bit. I think, you know, privacy and security, there's concerns that, you know, are whether you're in the US, outside the US, that vary state by state in the US.

Yeah.

And certainly, you know, in the EU is probably the only place I can think of that has a relatively large number of companies under a single framework with GDPR. But a lot of that is focused on digital. You know, if you think about like, I'm old enough to remember the phone book. I mean, you would get a phone book dropped in your driveway. It's got everyone's address and everyone's phone number.

Yeah.

Like the nature of how terrestrial data has evolved over the last 25 years, 30 years, It's pretty easy to find people's phone numbers and addresses and things even now out there on the web. So I think there's almost like we've been conditioned to expect that in some ways. And there's services out there where you can send people mail to their house. Digital is kind of a new frontier though. Digital, it's like when you sign on to a site now and the popup comes up, do you accept cookies and privacy policies and all that?

Yeah, user terms and conditions, which we all agree to, but nobody ever reads.

Just click and move fast. Yeah. I mean, usually, if you stop and look at what they're putting in there, it's going to say things like, you're allowing us to use your information for aggregated advertising or different solutions. And, I'm not saying don't click on that. That's your own decision to make. But, you saw the whole Google thing over the last couple of years, right? Cookies are going to go away. Now, they're going to kind of put that choice back in the hands of consumers. Do they want to click yes or no and accept cookies or not?

Yeah.

So it's a rapidly evolving space. What I would say is expect that you're gonna get aggregated pools of people to target, but at some point they're based on real identity. It could be a seed that it's based on and lookalike models and other things kind of boost those audiences up.

Sure.

And that's what Google's doing. All these walled gardens are doing is building kind of inside their walls. They're building targeting pools based on interest. You know, like, I love sneakers. I get targeted with sneaker ads all the time. I'm sure I'm part of some pools all over the place that say, you know, sneaker lover or, you know, Jordan fan that enables me to get targeted advertising as I'm crossing throughout the web, even if they don't know who I am at an individual level.

Interesting. Yeah. Okay. But that's, I think it's fascinating because I think that's And maybe this is all related to, tied to the COVID stuff too. I think there was more of a push to connect personal and professional profiles because people, at least a large chunk of, say, office workers were now working from home, right? They were no longer in an office identifying where they were and who they are. You know, it was a new challenge, but it sounds like there's progress on that. For better or worse, right? It's like, I'm like you, like I remember a time, I remember when I was doing database marketing and there is one question I have for you because you touched on it, but like I hired third parties to provide data and then process data because the volumes were so big that we didn't have the internal technology to be able to process it at the volume it was.

Yeah.

But I remember even at that time being just sort of dumbfounded about how much data was either directly about people or could be inferred about people based on things like their 5-digit zip code. And when you got a 9-digit zip code, it's like in the US, it's even more granular and just how accurate it was in a general sense. And now you've just got gobs more data. I think that's a technical term. Yeah, so do you still find that you have to, when you were doing CDP stuff and all that, like, I guess now all this is cloud-based, right? That wasn't the case back when I was doing this. So are you, is there still a lot of like data processors that are doing this for some of the companies you've worked with or what's that market like?

Yeah, there are. I mean, thinking back again to things I wish I knew at the time.

Right.

We ended up building the customer hub asset in a legacy on-prem database and then immediately moved it to the cloud like a year later. And that took like a year and a half. So these things are not overnight. Luckily, if you start in the cloud today, like Snowflake's a good example, there's a lot of composable capabilities now where you can separate storage and compute. So now it's like I only pay for the data that I store, and then when I want to call it or query it, I'm only paying for that compute. I don't have to buy a bunch of space ahead of time. You know, I can kind of like match it to my supply and demand, which has been a pretty big game changer. One of the things that I think is fascinating, you hear the word composability everywhere now.

Yeah.

Like we're actually taking a lot of our identity services and instead of saying, send us your data in a very secure, you know, SFTP secure way. We'll do the processing and append data and send it back to you. We're saying we're going to package up our apps and then we're going to containerize them and let you put them in your database so you can kind of run those services as a native app inside your environment. It's almost like bring your own, right? You can bring your own identity, bring your own data into your ecosystem. I will say that's leveled the playing field a little bit where You don't have to now go out and buy a huge set of on-prem hardware and build those databases, but you still have the challenge of it's expensive when you do massive scale. So it kind of depends on like what industry you're in, what's your target market? Are you talking about 5 million people or are you talking about like, you know, a couple hundred million? It can scale quickly.

Yeah.

But it's, I think that's less of a challenge now than it used to be, largely because of the rise of some of these cloud providers.

Yeah. So you touched on the volume, which is, I think, you and I both have worked in B2C, B2B, you more than me probably in both worlds. But I mean, my view is generally, I think B2C, the big challenge is volume, and B2B, the big challenge is the complexity of the data and the structures and the lack of controls about the data, particularly when you start getting into sales realm, right? Sales and customer success, because you've got people who are trying to get, you know, they've got incentives not necessarily to focus on data quality. And it's not their fault, right? It's just the reality. So like in your experience, like what do you see as things that are similar, common challenges in the B2C space and the B2B space? What's sort of the main, do you see other major differences or? Am I off my rocker about the ones I saw?

No, you're right. I think the volume challenge usually means you have to start with, let's say, your first-party data to go back to that and build a lookalike model and scale it, right? A couple hundred million people. We have, I think, like 270 million or so people in our graph. It's like the 18+ population of the US. It's like, how much of that market do you want to go after? And you can kind of scale up from there. The business side is a lot more complex though. You get down into all those relationships, right? Like you want to reach a decision maker. You want to reach somebody who's responsible for buying this type of software if you're selling to them in that regard. So quality becomes an important aspect, but also it's more expensive. I mean, the scale on the consumer side means you can get cheaper inventory at scale. You're paying lower CPMs. Anyone who's advertised on LinkedIn versus advertised like in Google, right? You'll know like it's scale on one side and lower CPMs and a lot tighter scale and it's more expensive per. So I think it actually makes it even more important that you know what your target is in the B2B space and you're able to kind of use the insights you can gather around somebody to make sure you're putting your eggs in the right basket and making sure you can drive the results you want, especially when you get to like frequency and other aspects. So.

Right, right, right.

Yeah, that's the only thing I would say to you is the spend side of it is different.

Spend side is different in that it's higher on the B2B side because of the complexity. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. More costly.

Kind of makes sense to me, right? Because it's, you're trying to solve a little more complex network. Problem, right? Connections, all these different things. Okay, okay, we've covered a ton of ground, and we're gonna probably need to wrap up here soon, but is there anything that we haven't covered here that you're like, hey, what is— these are the major trends that are happening in CDPs or identity resolution that people should be aware of as they're working with their organizations?

Yeah, so this will be our little future. We have to use the word AI in a conversation.

Of course.

We can't talk about data and not mention AI. Just .ai at the end of everything. So I guess the one thing I'll mention is AI-driven audiences and synthetic data is a huge thing. So you're getting a lot of, like, think about the globe, the entire world. It's hard to get addressable IDs on the entire globe, especially with this patchwork of privacy. So one of the things that's happening now is AI-driven audiences or synthetic audiences where I can like model out a whole country's population. I can test things in that instead of doing like a survey panel. I can test things out before it happens, right? So that's a really interesting and fascinating space for anybody who's interested in AI and synthetic data. I would say retail media networks are fascinating. I'm getting more into that now that I'm on the agency side of the world.

Retail media networks. What does that mean?

So that means I am a retailer or a company and I have my first-party data, I'm actually going to become an advertiser now. I'm going to use that information that I have for my customers and I'm going to kind of— there's kind of 2 paths, right? And usually you do a little bit of both. I can create audiences of my first-party customers and can serve those to other second parties to use for targeting. Think about like Walmart and Amazon and all those big companies.

Yeah.

The other side of it is like my own space. If I'm like a grocer, Maybe I have like advertisement screens in my aisles and I can, CPG brands can use that space to advertise.

So it's kind of what I thought. Yeah. And it's kind of a space that really only large publishers could do before, right?

Yeah. It's blowing up now. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And then anything else?

Last thing I'll say is data collaboration. It used to be like, you know, how do I use my data? to drive my outcomes, but now it's like, how do I partner with another company and overlap our data and see where there's opportunities? And that's where you get into clean rooms and other aspects. So, just to drop one more buzzword at the end there.

Clean rooms. Clean rooms meaning where we combine our data but we don't let— we don't completely share it.

No one sees the actual.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, that was always used for measurement before. Now, it's used for Let's actually overlap and see what shared audiences we have or what unique audiences we have. And a lot of partnerships are happening now around the ability to do that at scale now.

So interesting.

Yeah, I won't say any more buzzwords, otherwise we'll be here all day.

Yeah, no, it's okay. This has been fascinating and it's a little bit of me remembering where I started my marketing journey. So Very interesting stuff, Jeremy. Appreciate it. If folks want to connect with you, learn more about what you're doing, or just follow up with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

I'd say LinkedIn is probably the best way. Look me up on LinkedIn. I think it's, you know, JeremyCCatz@linkedin.com or something very basic.

Got it. Got it. Okay, perfect. Well, thank you, Jeremy, again. Thanks to our audience for continuing to support us. And as always, if you have suggestions for topics, Or guests, or you want to be a guest, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me through LinkedIn or through the marketingops.com community, and we'd be happy to talk to you about that. Till next time, bye everybody.