AMENIA, NY — Advertisers continue to rely on general metrics that may offer the value of industry-wide standardized comparisons across media channels, but provide little actionable insight while the identity resolution landscape rapidly shifts toward first-party data strategies and privacy-safe collaboration environments.
“I definitely still see some advertisers focusing on those ‘vanity metrics,’ which are things like website traffic or impressions or clicks where you don’t necessarily able to use that data to make actionable insights,” Holly Yonosko, chief analytics officer at IPG Mediabrands and Acxiom North America, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat Berkshires 2025.
Instead, Yonosko advocates for deterministic data that enables real-time decision making and drives measurable business outcomes through unified customer identification across touchpoints.
Acxiom’s unified customer view
IPG Mediabrands leverages Acxiom’s identity resolution capabilities to create comprehensive customer profiles that inform strategic media decisions. This unified identification system serves as the foundation for real-time optimization and audience targeting.
“Acxiom is what really enables us to create that unified ID across all consumer touchpoints in a customer journey,” Yonosko said. “We then take those touchpoints and work with our media teams on the agency side to create those media strategies to really optimize what audiences we’re going after.”
The integration of identity data with advanced analytics and AI enables predictive capabilities that help determine next-best actions for customer targeting in real-time scenarios.
Actionable insights over surface metrics
The persistent focus on vanity metrics prevents advertisers from making meaningful strategic decisions based on their data investments. Yonosko emphasizes the need to dig deeper into performance indicators that directly connect to business value.
“Advertisers really need to dig deeper into those actionable insights to understand, have we identified the right audience? Is that audience engaging with their brand in the right way? And ultimately, is it driving conversions and driving increased customer lifetime value with the brand’s consumers?” she said.
This shift requires moving beyond easily quantifiable — but ultimately superficial — measurements toward metrics that demonstrate actual customer engagement and long-term value creation.
Identity resolution’s fuller focus
The identity resolution landscape is evolving rapidly away from probabilistic, cookie-based approaches toward deterministic data sources that provide more accurate customer identification. This transition reflects both technological advancement and privacy regulation pressure.
“We’re quickly seeing brands move more towards that deterministic data, leveraging assets such as hashed emails or mobile advertiser IDs to get a real one-to-one view of consumer behavior,” Yonosko said.
Simultaneously, brands are prioritizing first-party data ownership while seeking privacy-safe collaboration opportunities through clean room environments that enable data matching without exchanging personally identifiable information.
Partnership importance
As brands move toward in-house data management, the value of second-party and third-party partnerships actually increases rather than diminishes. This counterintuitive dynamic occurs because internal data capabilities make external relationships more strategic and selective.
“We’re also seeing brands wanting to take their data more so in-house and building upon their own first party data, which then makes any second party or third party relationships even more important,” Yonosko said.
Clean room applications facilitate these partnerships by allowing brands to leverage external data sources while maintaining control over their first-party assets and complying with privacy requirements.
Human insight’s role in AI automation
Despite rapid AI advancement, IPG Mediabrands maintains focus on human strategic thinking while using automation for repetitive tasks. This balance requires significant investment in team training to ensure staff can effectively manage AI agents and prompting strategies.
“We really are pushing for training of our teams to make sure they understand how do you set up an AI agent, how do you prompt those agents?” Yonosko said. “We create this balance between leveraging the AI to do more of the repetitive tasks like data cleansing quickly, identifying insights so that our teams can then focus more on the strategic thinking, us as humans and empathy and making sure we’re integrating that into some of our strategic plans for our clients as well.”
