Stop Cutting Your TVC Down for Social. Start the Other Way Around.

At Advertising Week, a panel moderated by David Wells, Industry Principal, AdTech & Martech at Snowflake put a long-simmering industry tension front and center: identity is still core to powering activation and measurement — but the black-box model is holding teams back.

Across brands, publishers, agencies, and platforms, the message was consistent. The next phase of identity isn’t about improving single-vendor systems. It’s about owning the graph, composing it from multiple sources, and keeping control inside your data environment.

If you don’t have time to watch the full 30 minutes, here are a few highlights:

Composable identity = optionality, not abstraction

Uri Bushey, Head of Product at Narrative cut through the buzzwords by grounding composability in something buyers actually feel: optionality.

“For us, composability is optionality — on multiple vectors.”

That shows up in very practical decisions:

• Where identity data lives
• Whether identity is built from first-party, third-party, or both
• Which algorithms define “identity”
• How many providers you work with and when you switch
• Whether you want off-the-shelf algorithms, or you have a data science team with their own definition of identity.

The takeaway: composable identity isn’t about flexibility for its own sake. It’s about adapting identity to the use case in front of you without rebuilding your stack each time.

“Your data should be owned by you, your identity should be owned by you, in the place where it already exists in your data warehouse.”

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The problem with black-box identity isn’t just opacity. It’s also dependency. If you don’t build your own graph, it’s easy to get locked into a single provider. Or, if you push it into another platform, and now they kind of own your identity.

This framing shifts the role of third-party partners entirely. Providers become inputs, not gatekeepers — something you add, test, swap, or remove as needed, while the graph remains yours.

Publishers need interoperability that respects consent — not a “universal ID”

From the publisher side, Jenny Yurko, VP Data Product Strategy at Warner Bros. Discovery highlighted a reality often glossed over: identity fragmentation is structural, not accidental.

“Consumers go to different platforms in different ways, and different types of consents are applied. From an identity perspective that makes things difficult because combining those datasets is a difficult task. There’s not the same identity that comes from each platform.”

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So, for publishers, composable identity isn’t about chasing a single ID standard. It’s about federation and translation, while staying compliant.
Composability enables an organization to anonymize that identity and work with PII in a compliant fashion while ensuring interoperability.
Advertisers want flexibility. Publishers need infrastructure that delivers it without breaking consent or governance.

AI needs normalization, not just more data

The panel closed on a forward-looking point that’s at the top of everyone’s minds. AI makes identity more powerful, but also more fragile if the data isn’t normalized.

Uri framed it as a semantic problem:

“You need a common understanding of the context behind the data — the semantic layer…It’s a column called ‘gender’ but what does that mean?”

Without consistent meaning across sources, AI can technically query data, but it can’t reliably understand it. You need to be able to take that data and turn it into something that the LLM is not only going to be able to query with SQL, but also understand the meaning behind consistently.

Jeremy added the buyer-facing requirement: transparency.

“We try to bring transparency — the breadcrumbs — into each step of that process.”

AI-driven activation only works if users can see what data was used, how audiences were built, and why decisions were made.

What you should take from this panel

If you’re evaluating identity today:

• Brands should demand ownership of the graph, with third-party identity as modular inputs — not permanent dependencies
• Publishers and retail media networks need consent-aware interoperability that scales to advertiser demands without bespoke builds
• Ad and martech platforms win by delivering orchestration and usability on top of identity — not by owning it.

Or, as the panel repeatedly reinforced: the future of identity isn’t a better black box. It’s a graph you own, with normalized data composed for the use case at hand, and built to change.