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Don’t wait: 3 reasons to advance your identity strategy in 2025

A green traffic light with a person profile silhouette in the green light.

Illustration by Robyn Phelps / Shutterstock / the Current

There’s no doubt that 2024 was a volatile year for identity solutions. First, in April, Google delayed the timeline for phasing out third-party cookies, and then in July it called off deprecating third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. To many, this wasn’t a big surprise. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t send our LinkedIn feeds into a flurry of what-the-heck-just-happened commentary.

Once the initial uproar died down, some in the industry seemed to find comfort in the idea that they could just stop “worrying about the cookie” and perhaps even stop focusing on identity all together. But this approach would miss an opportunity to seize the moment. As digital advertising expands across an ever-wider range of channels, this is the time for brands to pioneer new approaches to identity that can help drive precision and value in their campaigns, while respecting consumer privacy.

As we continue into 2025, identity matters. Here are three reasons why it’s crucial to have an identity strategy.

Retail data is going to become the identity spine of CPG

CPG brands might feel disadvantaged when it comes to first-party data, since their lack of a consumer-facing relationship at the point of sale makes it more challenging to collect identifiers directly from users, both online and in store. But the rise of retail data over the last year is changing the landscape rapidly. As emails and phone numbers are used for both online and offline purchases, they can become a consistent signal for marketers with persistent identifiers such as Unified ID 2.0 or RampID.

Major CPG companies, for instance, which don't sell directly to consumers but have access to pseudonymized purchaser data from their retail partners can use identity to close the gap. This helps CPGs better understand how their campaign dollars lead to conversion, stoke loyalty and find new audiences who are likely to convert. Authentication is especially valuable in channels where the cookie doesn’t exist today, such as connected TV (CTV) and digital audio.

And if retailers can find ways to share measurement data with CPG brands for free it has the potential to create a virtuous circle, driving better returns thanks to this larger partnership opportunity. It’s another proof point that identity can support outcomes.

Identity is going to make CTV the cornerstone of an omnichannel strategy

TV has always been central to most major brand marketer campaigns. With consumers shifting rapidly to streaming, CTV advertising will only become a more essential advertising flywheel. Not only is CTV a signal-rich environment with high user authentication and more durable identifiers, but it’s evolving rapidly from a creative perspective. This year we’ve seen major advances in shoppable ads, more engaging CTV ad experiences, and widespread adoption of UID2 across the CTV ecosystem. As these innovations scale across more premium CTV providers on the open internet, so can the value of CTV within an omnichannel strategy. By pioneering new approaches to identity, CTV leaders are helping marketers understand how to drive addressability, personalization, measurement and campaign management across all digital channels. Because marketers want to apply what they’re learning in CTV across everything they are doing. And leaders in premium streaming — such as NBCU’s Peacock or Spotify — have the advantage of a directly addressable audience at scale, which brands also want to be able to leverage.

The cookie is going to lose its utility, no doubt about it

We can’t predict what Google will do next with third-party cookies or Chrome consent mechanisms. But that should not stop the rest of the industry innovating to find new approaches to identity and addressability that reflect the needs to today’s omnichannel marketers. So let’s not wait. Agencies like GroupM, with their identity spine Choreograph at the helm, are implementing broad testing strategies that suit different advertisers. Brands like Hewlett-Packard and Samsung are using more durable first-party data to their advantage to improve workflows. Let’s join them in research and experimentation with better data. We’re going to need many collaborative solutions to solve the challenges that Google will present to the advertising industry. We’ve got time to make mistakes, to learn from them and to implement tactics that we can trust and scale.


The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc. UID2 is developed by The Trade Desk Inc.