Only 21% of marketers feel confident they can accurately identify audiences across digital channels, according to a Digiday and IntentIQ survey. Despite years of investment in data, platforms, and personalization tools, identity remains one of the most discussed and least operationalized elements of modern marketing.
As signal loss accelerates and first-party data grows, identity can no longer be just a feature in advertising tools. It must serve as the foundation enabling media, measurement, personalization, and performance to work together.
Cory Davis, SVP of Business Development at Deep Sync, says this gap reflects uneven maturity across the ecosystem.
“The market is fragmented in how seriously identity is treated,” Davis said. “AdTech organizations are far ahead, while legacy media, agencies, and many brands are still catching up.”
This fragmentation creates disconnected customer views across platforms and partners, limiting both personalization and measurement accuracy.
From Advertising to Core Infrastructure
For years, identity has been positioned as a tactical capability: something to buy, bolt on, or outsource. Davis argues that this mindset is increasingly risky.
“When identity is treated as a tactic, organizations hit the ‘easy button’. But when you do that, the value accrues to the vendor, not to the brand, platform, or publisher.”
This shift is especially consequential as brands deepen their first-party data strategies. By 2026, hundreds of large advertisers will have invested heavily in proprietary data assets. Platforms and media destinations that fail to let brands directly activate those assets risk becoming interchangeable execution layers.
Identity infrastructure, Davis said, is what allows brands to bring durable identity into every interaction, not as something rented campaign by campaign, but as a persistent asset embedded across media, measurement, and customer experience.
The Cost of Guessing Who the Customer Is
Without a shared identity foundation, hidden costs grow over time as organizations struggle to connect activity to outcomes.
In many cases, the failure isn’t about advanced analytics. It’s far more basic. Teams cannot confidently answer simple questions, such as “Who is my customer?” Who came back? Who didn’t?
That challenge is reflected across the market: 90% of leaders report that fragmented and siloed identity data undermines their ability to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences (Yahoo Finance).
“Without identity infrastructure, teams end up optimizing activity instead of outcomes,” Davis explained. “Measurement becomes something you report on, not something that informs decisions.”
The result is inefficiency across targeting, attribution, retention, and lifetime value modeling, even as data volumes continue to grow.
Why Deterministic Identity Still Outperforms
Despite rapid innovation in probabilistic modeling and AI-driven audiences, performance continues to concentrate around deterministic identity signals tied to real people and real devices.
“The real-world signal still matters simply because it performs better than anything else,”
He points to scale as evidence. Platforms that can consistently connect advertising exposure to real individuals continue to generate outsized returns. Meta’s roughly $46 billion in free cash flow over the past 12 months underscores how deterministic identity enables performance at scale.
Much of the industry’s experimentation cycles through tactics that look strong in dashboards and measurement reports, but fail to compound real business outcomes. The closer marketing stays to its core goal, delivering a compelling message to a real person, the better the outcomes, Davis said.
Identity as a Profit Lever, Not a Cost Center
When identity functions as infrastructure, marketing shifts from experimentation to discipline.
“The most important job of a CEO is capital allocation. The best organizations treat marketing the same way, deploying dollars where they generate the highest risk-adjusted return.”
Identity enables this by connecting exposure to outcome, allowing every dollar to be modeled, measured, and improved through feedback loops. Over time, this changes how teams plan, justify, spend, and evaluate success. Identity infrastructure doesn’t just support better measurement, it enforces a culture of accountability and learning that compounds with scale.
At scale, this framework shapes culture, incentives, and growth strategy. Identity infrastructure also simplifies execution.
Rather than stitching together disconnected systems, teams operate from a shared identity layer that supports targeting, frequency management, attribution, and optimization simultaneously. Bringing identity in-house removes unnecessary data hops and accelerates learning.
“When identity lives inside the organization, platforms and media destinations become advisors and true partners. That institutional knowledge compounds and drives performance and business growth over time.”
More importantly, identity becomes the connective tissue that reveals the relationship between a brand and its customers over time, not just what happened, but who engaged, who returned, and how that relationship evolved.
Interoperability Remains the Industry’s Hardest Problem
While interoperability dominates industry conversations, execution remains elusive. Past attempts at universal identifiers, crosswalks, or translation layers have struggled to solve the problem for the ecosystem.
“Interoperability is easy to talk about and incredibly hard to incentivize. It’s a massive ecosystem with intense competition and short planning horizons.”
Doing interoperability right often requires short-term commercial sacrifice in service of long-term ecosystem health, a tradeoff few identity providers are structured or incentivized to make.
From Data Volume to Better Plumbing
The next era of advertising, Davis argues, will not be defined by more data but by better plumbing.
Identity infrastructure is what allows consent-based identity, activation, and measurement to function together cleanly. When systems connect, everything else becomes faster, simpler, and more effective. The companies that win won’t be the ones chasing the next identifier or short-term workaround.
They’ll be the organizations that invest in people, automate thoughtfully, and build durable systems designed to scale.They won’t just run ads. They’ll run identity as infrastructure.
About Cory Davis
Cory is a marketing and identity leader with nearly two decades of experience helping organizations drive growth through data, technology, and media. Over the past nine years, he has specialized in identity, working at the intersection of platforms and signals to solve one of marketing’s most complex challenges: connecting activity to real people and measurable outcomes.
Known for blending strategic vision with operational execution, Cory focuses on building durable foundations that improve decision-making, enable scalable growth, and create long-term leverage for organizations navigating an evolving digital landscape. Connect with Cory on LinkedIn!
Turning insight into infrastructure requires more than point solutions.
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