TransUnion today announced the launch of a new and improved identity graph to deliver better identity resolution and demographic enrichment. TransUnion is a major consumer credit reporting agency that also offers marketing solutions under the TruAudience brand. The identity graph supports the full range of these solutions.
The graph uses AI to cluster identifiers into individuals and households and evaluate the strength of the resulting profiles. The intention is to drive more value for marketers from the combined data assets of TransUnion and Neustar, the identity resolution vendor it acquired at the end of 2021.
Gauging the enhancements. TransUnion estimates that the new graph should increase marketable phone numbers by 25% and marketable IP addresses by 54%. TransUnion also recently received high ranks for accuracy in linking hashed email addresses to physical addresses, and across key demographic and small business categories (as assessed by The Truthset Data Collective).
The new identity graph offers the opportunity to add many new demographic attributes ranging from life events to home ownership, interests, and consumer and auto finance.
Why we care. Third-party cookies are on their way out of the door. Google really seems to mean it this time as it begins phasing them out for 1% of Chrome users. That may be a small percentage but it’s a lot of users. That leaves marketers and advertisers with the stark choice of abandoning any serious attempts at targeting, relying on varieties of contextual advertising, or finding alternative ways to identify audiences.
The many competing identity resolution solutions can contribute to the latter solution but they clearly still need work. Here’s an example of the work being done.
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About the author
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.
He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.
Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
