Identity Resolution 2025: Win with Audience-First Media Plans

Here’s the challenge keeping media planners up at night: Consumers are jumping from phones to TVs to laptops faster than ever, yet most media transactions are still managed in silos instead of being planned and measured holistically across platforms. The result? Oversaturated audiences, wasted spend and missed opportunities.

The reality is that “knowing your audience” has become exponentially more complicated in today’s fragmented media landscape. How do you prevent showing the same ad to the same person multiple times across different platforms?

Identity resolution connects disparate online and offline identifiers to a single individual or household as they interact with your brand across channels and devices. As a result, you can reach more desired audiences across platforms and link exposure directly to business outcomes, such as sales and brand lift.

But here’s the catch: Increasingly strict privacy laws like CCPA and GDPR have made it more challenging to collect and leverage consumer data. Let’s explore how to build audience-first strategies with privacy-safe approaches that actually work.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Why identity resolution is central to audience-first media planning
• How to design a modern identity resolution workflow
• How to protect consumer privacy while gaining granular insights

The importance of identity resolution in integrated media planning

The decline of third-party cookies, combined with the rise of streaming, connected TV (CTV) and social platforms, has made tracking users across platforms much harder. Yet, planning in silos fails to address modern viewer behaviors and makes it challenging to align planning, activation and measurement. 

Identity resolution solves the disconnect with a unified consumer profile, helping advertisers reach their intended audiences across platforms and receive high-quality measurements for a precise view of campaign performance.

Source: Wunderkind, 2024 CMO State of the Union, May 2024 (Secondary Source)

A strong identity resolution platform allows you to deliver a truly audience-first experience by:

• Measuring individual behaviors. It stitches together data from a household with multiple TVs, phones and laptops into a unified audience profile.
• Establishing true reach and frequency. It helps avoid underexposure and overexposure to maximize a campaign’s impact.
• Implementing cross-channel storytelling techniques. You can sequence messaging to audiences across platforms to build narratives instead of repeating the same spot.

Source: ID5, The 2024 State of Digital Identity Report, November 2024.

How to implement identity resolution

Wondering what identity resolution looks like in practice? Solutions like VideoAmp’s VALID™ ID Graph enable advertisers to precisely reach and measure target audiences across linear TV, streaming and digital platforms. Here’s how to create a closed-loop, audience-first approach:

Start by gathering first-party CRM, loyalty and purchase data in a privacy-safe environment to create a unified view of each customer. Modern identity resolution platforms enrich these profiles by linking offline attributes with digital signals, keeping data fresh through regular updates. 

Next, build precise audience segments tied to your business outcomes—whether that’s driving brand lift, sales, or other key metrics. AI-powered tools can help identify micro-segments that enhance personalization beyond broad demographic targeting.

Finally, activate these insights across channels while measuring what matters. Track which audience segments drive results through which platforms, then use those learnings to optimize future campaigns and maximize your ad spend.

Build a foundation for audience-first media planning success

The trend is clear: Identity resolution is the linchpin of modern, outcome-based media measurement. To succeed, you need a platform that connects multiple datasets into a precise view of audiences across platforms.

That’s why forward-thinking brands are partnering with VideoAmp. Our big data and tech engine VALID links identity and data for a privacy-forward media measurement solution.

Ready to connect the dots and drive business outcomes? Let’s talk.