As a marketer, you know the power of a personalized experience. You know how satisfying it is when an ad pops up during your evening TV time or daily social media scroll with the exact product you were looking for — or a product you didn’t know you needed. Whether you’re shopping for a back-to-school laptop or a memorable vacation, the brand that brings you the best option wins, and it shows in performance results. In fact, companies that deliver personalized experiences generate 40% more revenue than organizations that don’t.¹

You also know the downside of an ad experience that’s not personalized or feels misplaced. These are the ads you tune out or block. Not only do you ignore the brand, but you also associate it (and its ads) with negative feelings. More than 75% of consumers get frustrated when an ad or brand interaction isn’t personalized,² and worse, almost 70% of consumers unsubscribe, disengage, or simply don’t return to brands that create an inaccurate or invasive experience.³ How do you win when customers’ time and attention (and your marketing budget) is limited? You have to hit the mark — reaching the right customers with the right message from the first interaction.

For most marketers, creating effective, individualized brand experiences isn’t for lack of trying — it’s just never been more complicated. On average, U.S. homes have at least 17 connected devices,⁴ including devices that are part of the ever-growing “internet of things (IoT).”⁵ Shoppers also juggle multiple channels and devices before making a purchase decision.⁶ But where there is complexity in channels, platforms, and devices, there are also endless opportunities to reach consumers when and where it matters.

In a world of rising expectations, only precise, scalable, efficient personalized marketing can deliver the experiences your customers want — and drive the results your business demands.

There are more ways to reach consumers than ever before; but only 35% of businesses can deliver personalized experiences and more than half of U.S. business leaders in a Forrester survey said they need more data to do so.⁷

Here are a few reasons why marketers are still struggling:

1. Data fragmentation
2. Consumer privacy changes
3. Shifts in addressability
4. Economic uncertainty

Data fragmentation

Four in 10 advertisers say data fragmentation is their number one measurement and optimization challenge.⁸ But what exactly is data fragmentation? Put simply, data fragmentation happens when customer information, like behaviors, preferences, interactions, and identifiers, is spread across channels, platforms, and brands in the disconnected consumer journey — and it’s a natural result of the booming number of apps, channels, and devices. As new channels like gaming, niche social apps and publishers, and AI-driven tools emerge and popular channels like CTV grow, fragmentation persists and expands. For example, more than 80% of U.S. households now have one CTV device and up to four streaming subscriptions.⁹ Millennials and Gen Z are quick to adopt wearables and gaming consoles, often interacting with five or more devices per day.¹⁰

While more channels and devices create an unprecedented opportunity for greater marketing reach and personalization, it requires greater data access, accuracy, and connection everywhere consumers spend time. Without a way to consistently access and stitch together customer data, marketers can get lost between touchpoints in the customer’s journey. For example, a customer’s daily routine might consist of regularly engaging across their favorite search and news sites, apps, streaming services, and games — and they could be doing so on different phones, tablets, gaming devices, smart TV devices, and computers (personal/work) along their journey. As they switch from one channel or device to the next they may even use different names, emails, and phone numbers to authenticate (log in) across them. Marketers trying to connect these experiences struggle to keep up as customers bounce across devices, channels, and changing authentication methods. Even with investments in first-party data strategies and CDPs, brand still struggle to stitch these touchpoints together.

Consumer privacy changes

Another important change in advertising is better protection for consumer data. Lawmakers and privacy regulators are as concerned about this as customers. More than 80% of the global population is now protected by privacy laws, with more to come.¹¹ In the U.S., regulations on data collection and usage are tightening, and there’s a new focus on AI regulations,¹² specifically related to the misuse of personal data and discriminatory outcomes.

Consumers are also becoming more educated on their data privacy rights and protections. Almost 85% of shoppers prioritize data protection and 67% have already updated their privacy settings.¹³ Brands know data privacy is critical — at least half of U.S. business leaders surveyed by Forrester are actively partnering with technology companies that can meet security requirements and global privacy regulations. To build lasting brand trust and loyalty, advertisers must meet growing data privacy demands while responsibly serving experiences made with each customer in mind.

Shifts in addressability

One of the most significant shifts in addressability has been the slow move away from third-party identifiers, such as cookies, which marketers have historically relied on to stitch customer journeys together. Marketers are racing to adjust to cookieless channels like CTV as well as customers’ vigilance to protect their privacy — 65% of adults in the U.S. now turn off cookies and website tracking.¹⁴ As traditional methods of gathering customer insights disappear and evolve, marketers need new ways to access addressable data for campaign planning, personalization, and measurement.

Economic uncertainty

In today’s economy, campaign dollars must show return on investment (ROI)
and growth. But there are also more options for advertising budgets than ever before. While marketers carefully consider the suite of channels, platforms, and partnerships to boost with paid resources, budgets are shrinking in response to economic challenges. On average, marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of overall company revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023.15 As a result, the advertising industry has been launched into an outcomes era where every marketer, publisher, and partner is measured by their ability to drive growth. Moving forward, advertisers who can prove they’re reaching the right audiences with the right message at the perfect time will win — and winning in advertising today means:

• Partnering with the media partners and destinations where your customers engage and spend time
• Testing new partners to reach new audiences with personalized experiences
• Adopting tools to access clean, enriched data, create high-value segments that match to every touchpoint, and activate across partners to maximize reach
• Integrating smart, efficient activation strategies that drive measurable campaign performance, reduce marketing waste, and power business growth

A strong identity foundation

Delivering personalized experiences starts with getting identity right — and that begins by resolving every customer touchpoint. This process, known as identity resolution, ensures that each interaction is accurately matched to the right person. Unifying and deduplicating fragmented data across devices, emails, and IDs ensures that your customer profiles are accurate, consistent, and up-to-date at both the individual and household level.

To protect customer trust, your identity resolution solution must replace personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, emails, or phone numbers with a durable, interoperable, and secure identifier, such as LiveRamp’s RampID. This allows you to activate data across partners and platforms without exposing sensitive customer information.

With a strong identity foundation in place, you unlock the ability to scale segmentation, targeting, and activation with confidence. Accurate identity ensures you can maximize match rates and provide more meaningful customer experiences while preserving trust at every step.

Advanced audience segmentation

You don’t need segmentation to activate your data — but you do need it to personalize effectively. Resolving your customer data gives you the foundation to build high-value audience segments, so you can deliver relevant experiences that resonate. For example, you’ll know exactly which customers have school-age children and can target them with your next back-to-school campaign.

To segment more granular audiences, you need a way to connect your organization’s first-party data with second-, and third-party data sources (such as a robust data marketplace) in one place. Connecting data from your organization with external partners in a single, trustworthy platform not only helps you enrich customer profiles with additional attributes, like demographic or behavioral insights, but also enables advanced audience segmentation, collaboration, and analysis for optimization. Advanced segmentation includes AI capabilities that support lookalike modeling and enhanced match metrics, so you know you’re reaching the right audiences with the right message — unlocking greater relevance and precise targeting for more predictable campaign outcomes.

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Interoperability across the ecosystem

Solving data fragmentation and unlocking customer insights everywhere calls for a connected approach. To link customer information across teams, platforms, and partners accurately and at scale, the advertising ecosystem relies on trusted identity resolution. Solutions like LiveRamp’s RampID link and translate any combination of identifiers — from authenticated audiences to third-party signals — while helping to respect each customer and partners’ privacy rules and preferences. When this connection happens, the entire advertising ecosystem works together: brands can gain a clearer view of their customers, deliver a consistent customer experience on every device and channel, and collaborate more easily with partners.

Not all identifiers can deliver true interoperability. Unlike hashed emails (HEMs), RampID is embedded across every major platform, including Meta, Google, and Pinterest, and connects with authenticated audiences from more than 21,000 publishers. As a result, the prevalence of RampID solves for signal loss, powers persistent addressability, and helps brands reach consumers on 92% of the digital channels they spend time.

A powerful network of partners

Even the most advanced marketers with the cleanest data can’t deliver truly innovative personalization alone. Scaling addressable audiences requires data collaboration — the secure connection of information across both your organization and trusted partners to uncover insights and opportunities that no single data set can provide. The key to effective data collaboration? A powerful network of brand and media partners.

Because you can’t be everywhere your customers are, partnering is essential. By tapping into a strong network, you maximize your addressable reach along the entire consumer journey. This enables you to deliver real-time personalization, optimize campaign performance, and prove accurate ROI to key stakeholders.

This is exactly what the world’s most powerful data collaboration network makes possible. With LiveRamp, marketers can responsibly connect, segment, activate, and enhance customer data wherever it lives — in your own environment or across clouds — to achieve 44% higher match rates than HEMs across more than 500 of the most important media and martech platforms.

Optimization and measurement

Once you have data-driven personalization in motion, you’ll need to gauge performance — first by individual platform and then across your media spread.

Start by implementing conversion APIs (CAPIs) with each platform you activate your data on. The CAPIs will send transaction and event signals back, enabling in-flight campaign optimization. This feedback helps marketers deliver smarter, more cost-efficient campaigns by revealing which tactics are driving success. For example, you can answer questions like: Did more conversions come from the personalized promo banner on your website or from your Meta ad creative? How does improving ad relevance impact cost per acquisition (CPA)?

Once you’re able to optimize by platform, use cross-media measurement to see a holistic view of performance across all channels. Using a consistent identity framework like RampID makes it possible to measure customer data from different platforms in one unified view. This stronger measurement foundation doesn’t just improve short-term performance; it fuels better personalization over time.

With clear signals on customer preferences and behavior, marketers can refine segments and activate smarter to deliver more relevant experiences — strengthening campaigns today and customer loyalty in the long term.