If you have ever inherited a home with copper pipes soldered together in 1974, you know the feeling: everything still works, mostly, but you would never install it that way today. The advertising industry's customer identity infrastructure, it turns out, provokes a similar reaction among the people who built it.
The occasion for this architectural soul-searching was Publicis Groupe's $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, the data connectivity company that has served for years as a kind of universal adapter between brands and the platforms where they wish to reach people. The deal, announced in June, was large enough to rearrange the supplier landscape and, perhaps more consequentially, to give marketers permission to ask a question many had been politely avoiding: Should something this important be rented?
At a session during the Cannes Lions festival — billed, with characteristic subtlety, as "How to Survive in a Post-LiveRamp World" — a panel of identity specialists arrived at what Dom Burch, the former Asda and Morrisons executive who now advises retailers on data strategy, described as an uncomfortable consensus. If anyone were designing customer identity systems from scratch today, Mr. Burch wrote in a recent essay, nobody would build them the way the industry actually has.
The current architecture, as one panelist noted, functions as a kind of toll road: brands pay to move their customer data from place to place, transforming and copying records along the way in processes that made sense when cookies were plentiful and cloud infrastructure was less sophisticated. (That is to say, 2015, which in technology years might as well be the Eisenhower administration.)
The healthier disagreement, Mr. Burch observed, concerned pace rather than direction. Some argued the Publicis deal merely accelerates a transition already underway. Others defended the "easy button" — the industry's term for a solution that works well enough when marketing teams are under pressure to deliver results rather than redesign plumbing.
But no one on the panel, Mr. Burch noted, argued that brands should simply recreate their existing workflows with a different vendor. That, as he put it, is the tell.
Publicis, for its part, almost certainly anticipated that some LiveRamp customers would explore alternatives after the acquisition. The more interesting consequence may be that the deal forces everyone else to think clearly about what problem they are actually solving — and whether the answer involves renting infrastructure or, finally, owning it.
Original story published in The Drum: "Dom Burch: We wouldn’t build customer identity like this if we were starting again | The Drum"