Gigya, the leading customer identity management platform, had introduced Lite Registration, a new capability in its Customer Identity Management platform which leverages the universal consumer identifier — the email address — to help brands connect with customers earlier in the buyer journey. We spoke to Jason Rose, SVP Marketing at Gigya to understand how the company distinguishes between different data points and the possible impact of GDPR and regulatory policies on marketers providing hyper-personalized customer experiences.

MTS: Tell us about your role at Gigya and how did you arrive here to be a part of a MarTech company?

Jason Rose: Before launching a career in marketing, I worked as a professional accountant. My background in accounting has given me a metrics-based approach to marketing. Prior to Gigya, I led marketing for DataSift, the leader in Human Data Intelligence, and marketing efforts for SAP’s Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics solutions. At SAP, I helped scale the business to more than $2.1 billion in revenue by creating innovative programs to target large enterprises, small and midsize companies and volume solutions.

Now at Gigya, I am senior vice president of marketing. Gigya identifies, engages and builds customer profiles to create relevant, personalized experiences and is designed to meet privacy, compliance, security best practices. Customer identity and access management wasn’t a market when I joined Gigya, and, as a marketer, category creation has always been on my bucket list. Gigya has provided me with the opportunity to pave the way with a new category which has been an exciting venture.

I also joined Gigya because the company plays a key role in some important burgeoning trends; namely, new privacy regulations put forth around the world (like the Russian Federation’s Personal Data Protection Act and GDPR), and using deterministic/first-party data to help companies comply with these worldwide privacy laws and regulations.

MTS: Could you help us understand the difference between Audience Data, B2B Data, Identity Management and Location data?

Jason Rose: Both audience and B2B data operate at a segmentation and grouped level making them more anonymous and “probabilistic” in nature. For example, DMP’s and other 3^rd party data providers will sell you audiences based on inferred characteristics that have a % of accuracy. In contrast, with identity management, you are dealing with individuals so the data is “deterministic” and close to 100% right. So it comes down to whether a 10% margin of error acceptable or do you want to be sure you are making the right offers and personalizations. Location data is about knowing where someone goes and in what order they travel from place to place, so it is more specialized and an example of individualized data that needs to be treated carefully and creatively so it doesn’t come off as invasive and “creepy”.

MTS: How would you define Data Privacy from a consumer’s and a marketer’s Points Of View?

Jason Rose: Data privacy from a consumer standpoint is about the consumer’s ability to control how their personal information is being used by the companies they do business with or the sites they visit online. For marketers, however, data privacy has a much broader definition. For them, any online data, however inaccurate, out-dated and often ill-gotten (usually through third-party data brokers), is fair game. However, as a result of using this data, consumers don’t trust brands or marketers with their data. A recent survey found that 68% of consumers don’t trust brands with their data, reducing the hope for marketers to establish a lasting, personalized relationship with such customers.

MTS: How does Gigya’s Customer Identity Management help in finding the exact marketing attribution touch-points?

Jason Rose: Gigya’s Customer Identity Management platform helps today’s enterprises build great customer experiences at scale while balancing data privacy and security. Gigya establishes meaningful connections — based on trust — that encourage customers to self-identify and engage. It enables true permission-based marketing by unifying customer identity data in a secure, compliant and privacy-friendly platform. By doing this, Gigya captures touch points across devices and browsers and ties it back to deterministic data sets to get a complete view of the customer journey.

MTS: What is the biggest unforeseen challenge for marketers in turning customer identity data into actionable campaigns?

Jason Rose: The biggest unforeseen challenge for marketers is getting the customer to move from “anonymous” to “known,” and then showing the value that the customer will gain in exchange for their personal information.

Once this barrier is crossed the challenge becomes centralizing that data and using it consistently across the entire digital stack. While this may seem easy, in a recent conversation with one of our customers they had identified over 3,000 systems that contain customer data.

MTS: Do you think Mobile-First brands have to find better ways to tackle Data Privacy issues? What are the possible action plans for such marketers?

Jason Rose:  Both Mobile-First and traditional brands must tackle data privacy issues. Mobile-First adds another layer of privacy issues that marketers need to think about — location information and other requirements that must be treated even more carefully than traditional types of data. Making sure the consumer has transparency into what data is being collected and how that data is going to be used is critical in establishing trust. The best plan of action marketers can take to solve these data privacy issues is to lead with transparency. Communicating which data is being collected and needed to provide great customer experience will help establish trust between the brand and consumer.

MTS: Do you agree that marketers are finding it difficult to manage Big Data? How does Gigya help such marketers?

Jason Rose:  I agree that marketers are having a hard time managing Big Data. Gigya helps the issue of managing Big Data by putting the individual first and all the Big Data transactions (web behavior, devices, touch points, etc.) second. By putting the individual first, Gigya helps marketers take action on the Big Data and look at it through the lens of the customer.

MTS: Will ID Management ever become a part of Marketing Automation like LinkedIn is trying to do? Or, will it continue to be a stand-alone category for CMOs to choose and invest in?

ID management will remain a separate category because it spans multiple marketing clouds and systems. The CMO is constantly working across all these systems and will continue to do so versus being embedded in one system. Just like the example I gave above it’s easier to have ID sitting outside your 3,000 systems that require this data vs. changing 3,000 systems.

MTS: Do you think regulatory policies are a barrier for marketers in providing hyper-personalized experiences to customers owing to adherence to Data Privacy?

What we are seeing with GDPR, for example, is an attempt to put consumers back in control of their online data. But these regulations don’t have to be restrictive for marketers. The answer is easy: To comply with regulatory requirements and concurrently personalize communications with consumers, marketers must rely on first-party, permission-based data.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Jason. 

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