Nothing embodies change as much as today’s marketing and advertising technology ecosystem. Seemingly every day, existing players are consolidated and new players emerge.

Broadly, martech refers to the ecosystem of tools used to automate, measure, and amplify marketing efforts to reach specific customers and customer segments. The category covers advertising and social media tools, email, and content marketing software. Adtech focuses on the very top of the sales funnel and building inbound marketing campaigns. It uses a system built on the cookie to tie together the open marketplace of media platforms and content platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

But the cookie — on which so much of adtech relies — is on its way out. With the cookie’s deprecation, how can marketers unify martech and adtech? How do they approach their media and marketing spend in a way that is channel agnostic? A consumer identity solution is central to answering both questions. In fact, the concept of identity is key to how agencies and brands can design for the next generation of human signals for voice, artificial intelligence, and the idea of data mobility.

The only way to future-proof against the evolving adtech-martech ecosystem and potentially new legislative requirements around privacy and consumer data protection is to design a marketing strategy with an identity-based approach at its center. Identity-based marketing can build a future that helps brands better understand their businesses and the people they serve and safely port all data across all experience journeys.

Read the full article on the Association of National Advertisers website.