IPG's new identity solution works across open web, walled gardens

Dive Brief:

IPG's marketing intelligence company launched Kinesso Intelligent Identity, or Kii, on Sept. 30, according to a press release. The solution connects identity across the open web and within walled gardens, enabling a 20% increase in campaign reach through match rate improvements, per the release.
Kii, pronounced "key," is already live with clients across a range of verticals, and IPG Mediabrands and The Trade Desk are among the first media partners using Kii. The solution is available in the U.S. with planned expansion to the UK, Australia, Germany, Canada and more in 2022.
The launch of Kii comes as brands and agencies work to create and bolster privacy-first identity solutions that will ensure addressability as third-party cookies and mobile ad IDs are phased out and limited, respectively.

Dive Insight:

IPG's Kii is the latest development in identity solutions that seek to provide addressability as the data privacy landscape tightens. While Google will phase out third-party cookies in 2023 — instead of by the start of 2022, as originally planned — both the tech giant and competitor Apple have limited how advertisers can track consumers, especially on mobile platforms. Central to Kii is the promise that it will help advertisers across the marketing ecosystem, on both the open web and behind walled gardens like Google, Apple and Facebook.

"While brands are spending billions of dollars on technology to ensure addressability ahead of the demise of the third-party cookie, no approach has been able to connect identity across all 'doors' of the marketing ecosystem," Arun Kumar, CEO at Kinesso and global chief data and marketing technology officer at IPG, said in a press release. "Rather than merging all channels into one integrated 'firehose', Kii unlocks the borders between media, paid, and direct mail, in a channel agnostic way, to truly solve addressability and deliver seamless, relevant and respectful customer interactions."

To do this, Kii integrates with partners across the advertising ecosystem — including digital media, CTV, tech providers and platforms — to enable the activation of high-value audiences across any addressable channel, according to details emailed to Marketing Dive. The solution has typically seen a 20% increase in campaign reach due to match rate improvements via its proprietary Cascade Syndication system.

IPG says Kii can also offer cost savings by matching a brand's first-party CRM data and mapping it to Kii identifiers, reducing the need for third-party onboarders, like LiveRamp and Throtle, that take offline data and bring it into an online environment, per the details shared.

Along with clients across a variety of verticals, Kii is being used by media partners including IPG's Mediabrands and The Trade Desk, the demand-side platform firm that developed leading cookieless solution Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0). Previously, IPG's Kinesso and Acxiom companies were named closed operators within UID 2.0, which will be interoperable with Kii, per the release. Kii's interoperability could help advertisers, publishers and other ad world players provide relevant advertising in exchange for free content, Trade Desk CEO and co-founder Jeff Green said in the release.