Identity Optionality–Building a Smarter Identity Graph

In today’s fragmented media landscape, no single identity provider can deliver the coverage, accuracy, and flexibility that businesses need. The proliferation of platforms, devices, and data types makes managing customer identities a complex and ongoing challenge.

At the center of this challenge lies a simple truth: anyone can match IDs, but building and managing an identity graph that layers those IDs together over time—while giving you control and transparency—is no small task.

The Limitations of One-Dimensional Identity

Most organizations begin with just one or two identifiers, but gaps quickly emerge:

• IP-based traffic: Broad but imprecise, representing multiple individuals in the same household.
• Credit card transactions: Valuable in verticals like QSR or retail, but rarely connected back to a persistent user profile.
• Hashed emails: A privacy-safe foundation, but users often maintain multiple emails (work, personal, shopping-only) that don’t always connect.
• Mobile identifiers (MAIDs): Great for app-level targeting, but prone to churn as users switch devices or reset their ad IDs.
• Customer PII (emails, phone numbers, addresses): The gold standard for first-party data, but difficult to activate without secure, scalable connections to external ecosystems.

Taken in isolation, each data type provides only a partial lens into the customer journey. Left unconnected, they lead to fragmented engagement and underutilized customer value.

From Optionality to Identity Graph

The key isn’t just having multiple identity providers—it’s managing that optionality through a cohesive identity graph.

An identity graph acts as the control layer, integrating multiple identifiers into a single, flexible framework. Instead of a linear waterfall of matches, the graph enables you to:

• Layer multiple identifiers together (PII, hashed emails, MAIDs, CTV IDs, and more) to create persistent, evolving customer profiles.
• Control the sources of truth—decide which provider is best for specific identifiers, and replace or supplement them as needed.
• Evolve over time as new identifiers emerge or as regulations and customer behaviors shift.
• Avoid lock-in to any single provider by ensuring that the graph—not the vendor—owns the connective tissue of your identity strategy.

This approach turns identity from a static purchase into a dynamic asset that compounds in value over time.

Use Cases for Identity Graph + Optionality

By managing identity optionality through a graph, businesses unlock more precise, cost-efficient, and future-proof outcomes:

• Media Networks & Publishers: Increase the percentage of addressable impressions by stitching together hashed emails from one provider, mobile IDs from another, and CTV household IDs from a third. The graph ensures persistent profiles and maximized ad yield.
• Marketers & Brands: Start with customer PII from loyalty programs, then enrich with external partners for mobile IDs and hashed emails. The identity graph acts as the memory, preserving those linkages over time so personalization and measurement improve with each campaign.
• Agencies & Ad Tech Platforms: Agencies managing diverse clients can dynamically switch providers per campaign or vertical. The graph centralizes identity across clients, ensuring optionality without losing consistency.
• Vertical-Specific Examples:
  • QSRs: Link card transactions to hashed emails, then enrich with mobile IDs for same-day retargeting. Over time, the graph builds durable customer profiles that bridge offline and online.
  • Financial Services: Maintain strict compliance by keeping verified PII at the core of the graph, while layering in device and behavioral IDs for scale.
  • Retail Media Networks: Use the graph to merge first-party purchase data with supplemental identifiers, offering advertisers a holistic but privacy-conscious audience view.

Why Managing Optionality is Hard—and Valuable

The hard part isn’t finding identity matches—it’s governing the complexity:

• Ensuring deduplication and avoiding false linkages across multiple providers
• Continuously updating identifiers as customers switch devices, emails, or preferences
• Prioritizing coverage vs. cost when multiple providers can resolve the same identifier
• Adapting quickly to shifts in privacy regulations or platform-level changes (e.g., IDFA deprecation)

An identity graph is what makes this manageable. It turns optionality from chaos into a strategic advantage, giving organizations the control to adapt, the flexibility to choose, and the persistence to build value over time.

Identity optionality isn’t just about having more data providers—it’s about building an identity graph that manages them intelligently.

By layering identifiers, enforcing controls, and evolving with the market, businesses can transform identity from a fragmented necessity into a core strategic asset. The organizations that succeed will be the ones that don’t just match IDs, but manage them—flexibly, persistently, and at scale.

Ready to build and scale your identiy graph? Book a demo today.