Identity Graphing
What is an identity graph?
If you work anywhere near digital marketing you will have no doubt heard this term before, but sometimes it gets technologized and abstracted in a way that is unhelpful.
An identity graph provides single, unified views of customers and prospects based on their interactions with a digital product or website across a set of devices and identifiers. These can include Email Addresses, Customer IDs, Device IDs, Cookies, and so forth.
An identity is "resolved" when an actions or events get connected to an ID in the graph.
Identity graphs are used for personalization and targeting of digital media at massive scale, up to millions and even billions (Meta, Google) of users.
The idea is based on a branch of mathematics called graph theory which models “pairwise relationships” between and across multiple objects efficiently.
In the world of consumer privacy, identity graphs can seem problematic because they aggregate information in connection with IDs potentially without explicit consent each time. That may be true, but they are also essential to protecting privacy because they record and link consent choices to individuals allowing them to be persistent.
Amazon's Neptune and Adobe’s AEP are two well-known platforms that power identity graphs. More here:
