Seventy percent of marketers say it’s more difficult than ever to identify audiences across multiple touchpoints. Sixty-six percent say they use 16 or more marketing solutions. The findings are based on a Forrester survey of 325 marketers in Q4 2024, supported by TransUnion’s TruAudience.
It’s the complexity of the stack, Forrester concludes, that creates growing barriers to personalization, increased marketing efforts, AI integration, and effective marketing spend. Conversely, using identity resolution tools to connect fragmented data across the stack appears to be helpful: 93% of marketers say they achieve their customer experience and understand their goals.
An overview of the research can be downloaded here (no registration required).
Why we care. Let’s be clear, TruAudience’s offering is to connect your customer data across your marketing platform with a single identity graph. This is not to say that the challenge is not real and that one or another identity resolution tool could help solve the problem.
One thing to understand is that this is a problem that is likely to become increasingly difficult to solve. Not only does the number of marketing channel types continue to grow (see Retail Media Networks and CTV), but the number of outlets within these types also continues to grow (see Discussions). We could see a consolidation of martech stacks due to budget constraints, but don’t bet your budget on it. THE Marketing Technology Supergraphic recorded a 27.8% growth in the number of martech applications available year-over-year. Someone is using them.
Dig Deeper: 3 approaches to merging profiles when resolving identities
Disparate data obscures a single view of the consumer. Said TransUnion:
While new touchpoints and technologies present new and exciting opportunities, they also introduce challenges in connecting all of this disparate data. This can create an incomplete picture of consumer behavior…
Regardless of TransUnion’s TruAudience business, this statement is surely accurate.
