The cause of, and solution to, most media headaches? It’s the identity, stupid
Opinion
Brands must make customer identity core to their media strategy. Here’s how.
The industry can talk data, context, and AI all day, but until they tackle the root of misplaced ads, it’s just noise.
Why? Because they’re building on the wrong foundation. Pretty much every major challenge in marketing today stems in some way from weak, or absent, customer identity strategies.
- Waste — The reliance on unstable signals like IP addresses and third-party cookies creates an illusion of addressability, but it often leads to inaccurate, disruptive ads and wasted impressions.
- Fragmentation — It’s harder to understand customer behaviour and identify the right moments to engage as consumers move across multiple devices and platforms. The issue of fragmentation is compounded when digital identities are based on inferred data, creating an inconsistent view of the customer.
- Measurement — Last-click attribution fuels cheap, high-volume media buying, when true incremental measurement demands stable IDs for clean control groups. Platforms withholding raw data further hinder media quality verification.
There’s a huge disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots” when it comes to customer identity. If you think about a retailer with an established loyalty scheme, sight of customers across channels, and the means to tie these signals together via a consistent identifier, it’s a vastly different world to a brand relying purely on third-party signals.
The imbalance of power is especially evident in walled gardens that control user IDs, requiring advertisers to upload and then essentially “rent” access to their own customer data. These platforms often cannot tell advertisers exactly who was messaged.
But brands don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Gradually connecting data across channels allows marketers to build a clearer picture of their customers. Each step improves addressability, reduces waste, and sharpens measurement.
Tackling irrelevance
Brands can replace unstable signals with persistent, consent-based identifiers. To obtain persistent identifiers, brands must adopt identity resolution platforms that unify pseudonymised offline data with other pseudonymised online data for specific purposes where users have given consent.
At the same time, brands should focus on the consolidation of insights from various touchpoints — such as online interactions, in-store purchases, and mobile app activity — into a unified view. Again, with user consent at the forefront.
For instance, combing deterministic matching methods like email or mobile numbers with hashing can help create a stable identity across devices, channels and campaigns without compromising individual privacy. The approach significantly reduces wasted spend by providing a stable, cross-channel mapping.
By using platforms that support omnichannel identity management, marketers can gain a comprehensive understanding of customer behaviour, enabling better performance and measurement. For example, a retailer might use a CDP to merge CRM data with app activity and in-store purchases, creating a rich profile that reflects the customer’s journey across different channels.
Building first-party data with consent
Another critical step is building robust first-party assets through campaigns that incentivise customers to share data directly with the brand. Loyalty programs offer a model for a fair value exchange, providing benefits to customers while enabling better privacy and user control. By deploying consent management platforms (CMPs), brands can transparently collect opt-ins and document preferences. The approach not only enriches customer profiles but also fosters trust, leading to higher engagement rates from personalised campaigns.
As an example, a brand might launch campaigns that ask customers to share preferences directly, through quizzes, surveys, or interactive experiences that reward customers for their participation. By integrating these insights into their platforms, brands can create profiles that reflect actual customer preferences rather than inferred behaviours.
Strengthening measurement
Finally, brands need to strengthen their measurement capabilities by adopting identity-centric attribution models. To do so, they must move beyond last-click attribution and demanding person-level reporting from platforms.
By using persistent IDs to measure exposure and outcomes, marketers can isolate the true impact of their campaigns. AI-driven analytics tools can then predict optimal channels and timing for conversions and testing control groups to compare exposed vs. unexposed audiences. Such an approach provides accurate incrementality measurement, reducing misallocated spend and ensuring that marketing efforts are optimised for real impact.
In practice, optimisation might involve partnering with platforms that share raw exposure data tied to persistent IDs, rather than relying on aggregated cohorts. By doing so, brands can verify the effectiveness of their strategies and make informed decisions about future campaigns.
The path forward
By gradually connecting insights across channels and building robust first-party assets, marketers can achieve real personalisation, smarter cross-channel campaigns, and clearer results.
The path forward layers identity with consumer consent. A brand might start by auditing its current identity sources to determine areas where third-party cookies are being overused. Next, it could pilot a CDP to unify key data, such as email and mobile app activity. As these systems develop, brands can expand their reach, integrating more channels and refining their measurement capabilities.
As the identity infrastructure matures, the noise of fragmented data gives way to clear, actionable insights — enabling brands to speak directly to their customers with precision and relevance.
Ben Foulkes, is VP digital at Epsilon