Originally appeared on MarTech Series
Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today’s complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers.
We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever.
This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer.
Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed.
2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs
Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet.
The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising.
This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach.
2015-2020: The age of walled gardens
From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments.
However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms.
The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web.
2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy
By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking.
Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments.
Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape.
With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer.
2025: The omnichannel imperative
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up.
The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable.
Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape.
Adapting to the future of identity
The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind.
The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant.
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At Experian, we power data-driven advertising through connectivity. Today, we're excited to introduce our newest offering, which drives that connectivity: Experian Third-Party Onboarding. This new capability empowers third-party data providers by streamlining the monetization of their audiences through Experian’s expansive network of over 20 programmatic, social, and TV platforms. Data onboarding typically presents challenges, including complicated integration processes, limited ID matching capabilities, and opaque pricing structures, all compounded by less-than-ideal customer service. Experian Third-Party Onboarding eliminates the common barriers in the onboarding process and leaves users with a simple yet powerful solution for data providers to increase the adoption of their audiences and maximize their revenue. A leap forward in data connectivity Experian Third-Party Onboarding builds upon the investment and infrastructure used to distribute Experian's own audience segments. Notably, in 2020, we began the transformation of moving away from third-party partners to using our own direct connections for audience distribution. Compared to the competition, Experian’s Third-Party Onboarding capabilities offers data providers: Enhanced programmatic addressability: 50% increase in programmatic addressability compared to the competition. Superior CTV addressability: As a top identity partner in TV, we provide a 73% increase in CTV addressability as compared to the competition. Vast digital reach: Approximately 3.8B digital IDs that are active and addressable on a weekly basis. The first data providers to use Experian’s third-party onboarding capabilities are Adentro, Kontext, L2, and Webbula. "Moving beyond cookie-only third-party onboarding solutions is critical for our users in the age of cookie deprecation, and Experian's identity capabilities do that. Experian's match rates and speed to turn around audiences to a large number of platforms is critical for our political buyers during this very busy campaign season."paul westcott, evp, l2 Benefits to Experian Third-Party Onboarding Experian’s unique onboarding process enhances current capabilities and sets new benchmarks in the industry. The comprehensive benefits of Experian’s Third-Party Onboarding include: Future-proof your addressability: With Experian's advanced digital and offline identity capabilities embedded within this new onboarding solution, user audiences will automatically be expanded to a deep set of identifiers (e.g., CTV IDs, MAIDs, IPs, UID2s, ID5s, and more) to ensure scale and maximum addressability. Seize the CTV opportunity: Tap into the explosive growth of connected TV (CTV), the fastest-growing major ad channel in the U.S., with connectivity to more than ten TV destinations. Simple pricing structure: Straightforward revenue-share pricing structure free of hidden costs, ensuring clarity and trust in all financial dealings. Streamlined reporting: Gain valuable insights with self-service reporting available within days of receiving data from the platform. Drive growth and adoption with faster reporting, allowing you to track usage by segment, advertiser, or destination effortlessly. Efficiency and support: A self-service, user-friendly interface gives you control over taxonomy field names, CPMs, and destinations. It is complemented by a dedicated account team, which reduces the burden on user resources and guarantees a seamless experience from onboarding to activation to reporting. Support for syndicated and custom audiences: Seamlessly onboard bulk syndicated audience taxonomies and custom audiences to programmatic, social, and TV platforms through our existing integrations. “Both activation platforms and data providers familiar with our world-class identity capabilities and top-notch service have proactively asked Experian to provide third-party onboarding services. After listening carefully to how we can improve upon their current setup, we are excited to bring a solution to the market that directly addresses their needs.”scott kozub, vp, product management, experian Stay ahead of the curve Maintaining a competitive edge with your data is no longer optional; it's imperative. Experian Third-Party Onboarding arms users with advanced connectivity, unparalleled data expertise, and thorough support, positioning them at the forefront of industry innovations. Reach out to our team today to learn more about Experian Third-Party Onboarding and how it can make your data go further. Go further now Read the AdExchanger press release about Third-Party Onboarding Learn more Latest posts
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