The ad tech industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation as first-party data becomes the foundation of digital addressability. This shift is driven by increasing privacy regulations, the deprecation of third-party cookies, and growing consumer expectations around data transparency. At the recent IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, industry leaders emphasized that companies need to rethink their data management tech stack—moving beyond legacy models built for third-party data and toward seamless, privacy-compliant first-party data solutions.
The Role of Legacy Tools: DMPs, CDPs, and ID Graphs
Historically, the ad tech ecosystem has relied on various tools to collect, organize, and activate data for targeted advertising:
- Data Management Platforms (DMPs): Traditionally, DMPs aggregated third-party data, built audience segments, integrated with ad servers, and worked with demand-side platforms (DSPs) for targeting. However, their reliance on third-party cookies has made the legacy cohort of them less viable in today’s privacy-first landscape. A new cohort has evolved and are leaning into first-party data.
- Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): Unlike DMPs, CDPs are built around first-party data. They unify customer data from multiple touch points—website visits, CRM interactions, email engagement—into a persistent, privacy-compliant identity for better personalization. These tools extend DMP capabilities into use cases beyond targeting into marketing and customer retention.
- Identity Graphs: These tools stitch together identifiers (email, phone number, device ID, UIDs, etc.) to create a unified view of the customer across platforms. With third-party data declining, identity graphs are evolving to rely more on deterministic first-party data rather than probabilistic modeling.
The Opportunity: Consolidation and Value Creation
With first-party data at the center of digital addressability, there is an opportunity to integrate and streamline these tools:
- DMPs Must Evolve: The traditional DMP model is becoming obsolete, but vendors are shifting toward hybrid solutions that incorporate first-party data. Some are merging with CDPs or adopting data clean rooms for privacy-safe audience activation.
- CDPs Take Center Stage: CDPs are becoming the primary infrastructure for managing first-party data. By integrating with ad tech platforms and identity solutions, CDPs can facilitate seamless activation across both paid and owned channels.
- ID Graphs Become First-Party Anchored: Identity solutions must move beyond probabilistic matching and over-dependence on IP addresses and leverage authenticated first-party data sources like logins, email-based identifiers, and publisher-cooperative initiatives. Further, given that true publisher first-party data is at the ‘atomic-level’ meaning its derived from users on site (and not a 3rd party’s ID graph) there is more urgency to work with the publishers that put this data at the center of their offering for buyers.
Benefits of this Transition
For the industry as a whole, the move toward first-party-driven tech stacks presents three major advantages:
- Cost Efficiency & Consolidation – By integrating DMP, CDP, and ID resolution capabilities into a more cohesive stack, brands and publishers can reduce redundant spending on overlapping and overbuilt technologies.
- Better Audience Addressability – With more direct control over first-party data, brands, publishers and vendors can create more accurate and persistent audience profiles than the traditional patchwork of guesses using 3rd party data.
- Stronger Vendor-Publisher Relationships – As first-party data becomes the currency of digital marketing, the industry will shift from relying on third-party intermediaries to fostering trusted and secure, first-party data collaborations between brands, publishers, and technology providers.
The Path Forward
The ad tech industry must now focus on interoperability, privacy compliance, and efficiency. As the feedstock to modern addressability, first-party data is the most basic and raw 'atomic data' unit required to feed these myriad of data management systems.
Publishers, Brands, and vendors must work together to safely work with this data to seamlessly power both monetization channels likeDSPs, SSPs, and marketing platforms like CRMs, ESPs, etc - all the while ensuring strict adherence to privacy frameworks and protecting this data. The transition isn’t just about replacing tools—it’s about rethinking how brands, publishers, and vendors work together to maximize the value of authenticated, permissioned data and first-party data that is less deterministic yet valuable to advertising and marketing use cases.
This transformation represents both a challenge and an opportunity. The companies that move quickly to unify their tech stack around first-party data will be better positioned for sustainable, privacy-compliant audience engagement in the years ahead.
GrowthCode provides an addressability management platform that affordably and rapidly delivers identity graphs to both buy and sell sides and supports a myriad of use cases for safely monetizing the asset across the revenue portfolio. If you want to learn more about how we do this and stand up a proof-of-concept, reach out here.