Stirista Powers Its New Identity Graph with Real-Time Data

Consumers make purchases at an online store from your home computer, visit a product page at another site on a tablet, use a smartphone to post about it on social media and then go out and physically buy a related product at the nearby shopping center.

Every one of these encounters helps to develop a complete user profile, but they are all different slices of information, portraying separate selves. Unless they are integrated, they remain separate versions of you across physical addresses, Device IDs, real-world retailers, online stores, web pages of content, mobile devices, laptops, connected TV, and other dimensions in which you interact.

A persistent connector like an email address – often hashed for privacy purposes – or a device can unite the different data slices, creating an integrated identity graph that represents a holistic view of a household or an individual that enables marketers to better target their campaigns to relevant audiences. 

Aside from collecting and unifying all that data, the biggest challenge to a useful identity graph is keeping it current. With users interacting constantly throughout a day, it’s easy for data to quickly become outdated and inaccurate. 

But now data-driven marketing services provider Stirista has upped the ante, with the first real-time identity graph on the market.

Not a Luxury

While most identity graphs are updated every 30 or 90 days, the OMNA Identity Graph – unveiled by Stirista in April – updates every second. 

That real-time refreshing of user identity data is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. User relevance is a direct function of the data accuracy, and a key factor in accuracy is data freshness.

We continue to hear from frustrated marketers that have been promised access to real-time consumer intelligence data only to find out that much of what they are using to engage with customers and prospects is old, inaccurate data. Stirista brings to market OMNA, the first real-time identity graph, which is updated to the second and gives companies the insights they need to better understand their target households — where they work, how they spend their money, what devices they use, and the places they visit in a safe privacy-compliant manner.

Ajay Gupta, Stirista CEO

First, user data changes rapidly. Street address, device ownership, purchase data or other information helps define an individual or a household in privacy-compliant ways. Just think how many times a day you make a new choice about viewing content, watching a program, buying something, or visiting somewhere in the real-world. 

Second, the actual environment for reaching people or households with relevant messages is also changing rapidly. Most notably, the third-party cookie is fading away, and the ability to target or attribute ads on mobile devices is increasingly complicated. Linear TV advertising is dropping, as viewers move to other sources of content.

And new laws and awareness about user privacy have made user consent and anonymity an essential centerpiece of any data collection or identity management.

OMNA synthesizes billions of interactions that constitute about 500 identifiers for each profile. If marketers want to drill down beneath the comprehensive Identity Graph, they can access the constituent graphs: over 90 million U.S. households in the IP Graph, more than 1 billion connected devices in the Device Graph, and data about location intent and movement that is continually updated in the Location Graph.

The Central Tool

As most marketers realize, the data from third-party cookies was hugely inaccurate anyway, and it fragmented people into digital browsing patterns or mobile app interactions that didn’t necessarily reflect their complete set of interests. 

By contrast, the first and second-party data that form the core in identity graphs like Stirista’s OMNA are deterministic and highly accurate. As an integration of various data selves, such graphs give a more complete picture of a person or household’s interests and demographics.

It’s no wonder, then, that the identity graph has become the central tool for marketers in this new environment.

It can inform the ads delivered to a given household with a connected TV (CTV) ecosystem of broadcast, cable, and Over-the-Top (OTT) streaming services. CTV environments do not have access to cookies and are essentially walled gardens where viewer interests can be determined through the melding of various layers of identity data in an identity graph.

An identity graph can also guide advertising or other messaging to the mobile devices of household members, or the ads and content delivered to authenticated users on brand websites. 

The Speed of Life

With so many kinds of devices and platforms available to consumers, one of the biggest issues facing marketers is delivering relevant messages across channels of interaction – but capping their frequency so that viewers don’t feel bombarded. Additionally, there’s the problem of attributing the impact of a given message or campaign on eventual purchase, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a given marketing spend.

The best way to do that is by understanding a household or an individual across devices and in the real-world, via a comprehensive and up-to-date identity graph. OMNA lets brands onboard their own first-party data about their customers and visitors in less than 24 hours, matching and enhancing profiles with OMNA data so that a brand knows more about its own crowd.

As the pandemic recedes, marketers are now addressing a new and emerging world of consumer data. Identity graphs like OMNA are essential tools for navigating the targeting and attribution requirements of advertisers and the relevance and privacy demands of consumers, at a pace that mirrors the speed of life. 

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