The Identity Layer, Explained

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand what an identity provider actually does in the programmatic advertising stack. When a brand runs a campaign on a demand-side platform like The Trade Desk, it generates exposure data — records of which ads were served to which users, on which devices, at which times. Separately, the brand holds its own first-party data: customer records, purchase histories, email lists, and behavioral signals gathered on its own properties. The question that determines much of modern advertising effectiveness is how well these two datasets can be linked — how precisely a brand can connect “this ad was served” with “this customer subsequently bought something.”

Historically, that connection has required an identity intermediary: a data broker or identity provider that maintains a persistent graph linking the pseudonymous identifiers used in ad serving to the real-world customer identities held in a brand’s CRM. Companies like LiveRamp, Experian, and ID5 have built substantial businesses on precisely this function, sitting between brands and their media platforms and taking a fee — often a meaningful one — for the privilege of making the match. The arrangement has been, for years, simply the cost of doing business.

The tool built by Hightouch, an agentic marketing startup, is a direct challenge to that arrangement. It seeks to eliminate identity intermediaries entirely by allowing brands to match The Trade Desk’s exposure data logs directly against their own first-party datasets — without routing that matching through a third-party identity provider. The mechanism relies on clean room technology, which enables two datasets to be compared in a privacy-safe environment without either party exposing their underlying data to the other.

Why This Moment, Why Now

The timing of this development is not coincidental. The identity industry has been under structural pressure for several years, driven by the deprecation of third-party cookies, tightening privacy regulations in both Europe and the United States, and growing scrutiny of the opacity of identity intermediaries’ commercial arrangements. The Trade Desk itself has been actively reshaping its identity relationships: it recently overhauled the payout structure for its Identity Alliance — the “graph of graphs” that unifies multiple identity providers — shifting from volume-based compensation to a model that pays partners only for the incremental value their signals provide that cannot be found elsewhere in the system. The message embedded in that restructuring is pointed: identity providers need to demonstrate their unique contribution or risk their economics eroding.

Against that backdrop, a tool that allows a brand to skip the identity provider entirely and achieve direct matching between its own first-party data and Trade Desk exposure logs is not just a technical innovation — it is a commercial argument. The argument is that brands have been paying for a matching function that, in many cases, they could perform themselves with access to the right infrastructure. The fee paid to an identity intermediary is, in this framing, a rent charged on a capability gap that no longer needs to exist.

What This Means for the Industry

The implications extend well beyond the specific tool Hightouch has built. The broader trend it represents — the progressive elimination of intermediary layers in the programmatic stack as brands’ first-party data infrastructure matures and clean room technology becomes more accessible — is one of the defining structural movements in digital advertising in 2026. Walled gardens have long operated on the premise that brands need their matching and measurement infrastructure. The open web has historically required brands to pay identity providers to replicate that infrastructure outside the walled gardens. The convergence of first-party data investment, clean room technology, and direct DSP integrations is beginning to make that replication achievable without the intermediary tax.

For identity providers, this creates an existential strategic question: what unique value do they offer that cannot be replicated by a brand with good data hygiene, a clean room, and a direct platform relationship? For brands, the question is operational: do they have the data infrastructure and technical capability to actually execute direct matching at the quality level that identity providers currently deliver? For platforms like The Trade Desk, the question is architectural: how do they build the open ecosystem that accommodates direct brand connections without undermining the partner relationships that have made their identity network valuable?

None of these questions has clean answers yet. But the direction of travel is clear. The intermediary layers of the programmatic stack are under persistent pressure from both the technical infrastructure that makes them less necessary and the commercial pressure that makes their fees harder to justify. The brands and platforms that are building toward a world with fewer of those layers will be better positioned than those still organizing their strategies around the assumption that the middleman is permanent.