Casino gaming and hotel giant Caesars Entertainment is ramping up its people-based marketing efforts, and it’s tapping Acxiom-owned data onboarder LiveRamp for identity resolution.
“There are a lot of data partners out there for first-party data, for second-party data, for third-party data,” said Dwight Pirtle, internet marketing manager at Caesars. “But we’re looking to identify that one person so we can bring more context and engage with them on a one-to-one basis.”
On Tuesday, LiveRamp rolled out the next iteration of IdentityLink, its tool for unifying data across channels, this time aimed at marketing technology providers. The expansion will allow brands to more smoothly run people-based campaigns and speedily share data across their partners.
Launch partners include comScore, Rocket Fuel, Adobe, AppNexus, The Trade Desk, LiveIntent, RUN, Lotame, MediaMath and Datorama, all of which have integrated LiveRamp’s tool directly into their respective platforms.
LiveRamp first launched IdentityLink in October to help brands create an omnichannel customer view by connecting online and offline data points, including point of sale, mobile, CRM, call center, programmatic advertising, email, addressable TV and social data.
But brands work with multiple tech partners and it’s difficult to run omnichannel campaigns across them if they’re not all integrated. Part of LiveRamp’s aim is to help brands and their tech partners work together more fluidly.
“The technology platforms themselves are competing for people-based budgets in programmatic with likes of Facebook and Google, and they want to be able to offer people-based marketing and capture some of those budgets,” said LiveRamp CMO Jeff Smith. “They embed us into their platforms and we take care of the identity resolution that enables people-based targeting, personalization and measurement and managing consumer privacy.”
Caesars is using IdentityLink in part to connect its various tech partners.
“It allows us to home in on specific audiences across partners, which we’re doing programmatically,” Pirtle said. “When we push an audience to Facebook, for example, we can get a lot of data in terms of the affinities those users have online and we can expand that audience.”
Omnichannel at Caesars used to mean controlling frequency at an aggregate level. But as the brand starts to take greater advantage of its first-party data set – Caesars maintains a large loyalty program and recently combined its database with Atlantis, Paradise Island Partners after the two merged in April – people-based campaigns increasingly sit at the heart of its evolving omnichannel strategy.
Take the quarterly sales campaigns that Caesars runs across social, video and display on both mobile and desktop. Caesars uses its first-party database to know which people are interested in what properties and targets across channels.
“We’re segmenting our audience in a way that lets us see trends, so we can look and see what types of bookings are happening where, and that impacts the messaging and the way we go to market,” Pirtle said.
Caesars is also experimenting with using social to get loyalty program members to open their email and redeem their rewards. Consumers who neglect to engage with an email encouraging them to check out their rewards are gently prodded through social channels with a targeted message to do so. It’s still early, but Pirtle said email open rates and promotion redemptions are on the rise.
But identity-based marketing is also about eliminating waste and being as efficient as possible, said LiveRamp’s Smith.
“No matter who you are, brand or technology vendor, if you’re not as effective with your marketing as you can be, there is going to be some element of waste, with retargeting being the most visceral example,” Smith said. “Which is why it’s not just about a cookie, it’s about knowing you’re talking to an actual person.”
In Caesars’ case, it wouldn’t make sense to target a member of Seven Stars, the top tier of its loyalty program, for example, with a discount on a room because people in Seven Stars get to stay at any Caesars property for free. But a branding message would work for that audience.
“We’re actually trying to send fewer messages but to the right people,” Pirtle said. “The more digital touch points there are, the more important is it for us to really limit the amount of times we’re speaking to our customers.”
