Better Identity Comes From Connected Systems, Not Bigger Platforms

By John Piccone, Regional President, Americas, Adform

More than half of CMOs say their marketing tech stacks have meaningful gaps. The tempting response is to buy a bigger one.

It’s easy to see the appeal of one vendor and a single contract. It gives you a single number to call when something breaks. However, adding tools doesn’t close the gap on its own. Data silos and integration complexity, especially around identity, are what hold back marketing value.

A recent Gartner survey reaches a similar conclusion: CMOs named a lack of integrated marketing data the second most common barrier to AI-driven marketing efficiency, and 30% ranked it in their top three.

Consolidating operations onto a single monolithic platform won’t fix this. It just sweeps the data degradation under the rug.

To solve this disconnect, we need to consider where the signal breaks. For many brands, it’s the moment their audience leaves the martech ecosystem and enters the open web to be activated.

The Open Web’s identity disconnect

Walled gardens can track users directly because those users are logged in. The open web has no equivalent, so campaigns there stitch together deterministic and probabilistic identity technologies. This includes building makeshift ‘crosswalks’ between systems that were never designed to work together.

Every time that data hops between systems, it loses some of the audience. Match rates drop, and a good chunk of the budget often ends up targeting the wrong audiences.

There’s a related issue sitting in the bid stream. The match rate an onboarder reports isn’t the same as the reach an advertiser actually gets. They’re separate signals, and brands often can’t see the gap because they can’t see everything that happens in the bid stream.

Why connecting beats consolidating

The case for consolidation is understandable: put everything in one system to eliminate the crosswalks. The catch is that identity loss just moves inside the vendor’s walls, where the CMO can no longer see it. So the divide between martech and adtech remains, and the blind spots become much harder to find.

It also raises the old question of who owns the consumer. Brands, publishers, and adtech companies all compete for that relationship, and whoever runs the pipes tends to claim it.

Imagine hiring a printing company to print your newspaper, and they keep your subscriber list so they can own the relationships with your readers. No publisher would accept that, yet it’s close to how identity works in much of adtech today.

The distinction that matters is between ‘unified’ and ‘interoperable.’ Unified usually means locked into one vendor. Interoperable means systems that communicate with each other while the brand decides what plugs in. Only the second option leaves the CMO in control.

The solution: interoperable, composable architecture

The alternative is a composable architecture, with the brand’s own data warehouse as the central system of record and interoperable layers built on top of it: the CDP on the martech side, the DSP on the adtech side and journey analytics. Each does its own job, and none of them owns the data. This is how the industry can defragment identity and help brands grow.

On the way out, first-party audiences can be activated directly in cookieless, unauthenticated open web environments, with no third-party identity resolution in the middle. A brand’s own identifier enters the bid stream in a privacy-safe, GDPR-compliant way, without fingerprinting, so audiences are built on IDs the brand already owns and fewer people get lost in translation.

On the way back, log-level engagement from paid media flows into customer journey analytics against that same ID. This return path matters most. According to Gartner, paid media now takes 31% of marketing spend on average, a five-year high. Yet it’s often the hardest to tie back to the brand’s own data because adtech owns the ID.

Closing that gap connects adtech back to martech. Paid media goes from a black box to a measurable stage of the customer journey, and brands can check results against their own data instead of relying on a seller’s.

The interoperable future

The future lies in composable architecture and shared data, not in rigid vendor consolidation. The CMOs who get ahead of identity loss are the ones who connect their martech and adtech effectively, not the ones who simply buy the biggest platform. Ask yourself one question: does your match rate equal your paid media reach rate? If you can’t answer that with confidence, that’s the place to start. Interoperable systems are how you get the answer.