Permutive’s Joe Root: Less Than 30% Of Consumers Have An ID. And That’s Reshaping Addressability
AMENIA, NY — The advertising industry built itself on the assumption of near-universal consumer addressability. That assumption is yet to be realized. And most of the ecosystem is still catching up to what that means.
“Less than 30% of consumers have an ID. That creates a lot of downstream problems. It forces everyone into the same 30%. Costs go up, performance goes down,” Joe Root, co-founder of Permutive, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Beet Retreat Berkshires. “When you don’t reach consumers, you can’t sell to them, so incremental sales goes down.”
The causes are well understood: Apple’s privacy changes, the rise of ad blockers, regulatory opt-outs, and the ID-free nature of fast channels. But the industry’s response, Root argued, has been inadequate.
3 consumer profiles, 3 addressability signals
Root frames the addressability challenge through three distinct consumer segments, each requiring a different approach.
The first, somewhere between five and 30% of consumers, remain comfortable with traditional ID-based targeting. But it’s a pool that shrinks every year, Root said.
The second maintains a relationship with a specific media company and consents to data use within that context, enabling behavioral signal matching similar to what Meta does with its own audience. The third has opted out entirely, making contextual targeting the only viable path.
“Those three pillars of ID, first party data or behavioral signal, and contextual signal reform the new addressability pyramid,” Root said.
First party data is working against advertisers
The industry’s consensus answer to identity deprecation — build first-party data assets — turns out to be only half a solution. Matching that data to media inventory in a world where only 30% of impressions carry an ID eliminates most of the scale.
“If I want to go and target against my first party data, I need to make it addressable. Now your first party data, when you match it to the media company, loses all that scale overnight,” Root said. “It’s trapping you in a small pool of consumers where prices are high and performance is much harder to find.”
The better approach, Root contends, is using first-party data as a seed to identify behavioral and contextual signals on the path to purchase. From there, it comes down to targeting those signals rather than the data itself.
Can publishers reach 100% addressability?
When media companies apply first-party data effectively, addressable audiences can expand from roughly 20% of inventory to 100%, a transformation Root has seen play out on the supply side where Permutive started.
“When media companies apply first party data really well, they can take addressable audiences from about 20% of inventory to 100% of inventory. And that’s quite transformational,” Root said.
The infrastructure shift that makes this possible is moving data processing toward the edge, enabling real-time matching that cloud-based models are too slow to support.
Making a functional ecosystem
Root outlined the architecture required to solve addressability at scale: publisher signals consolidated in one place; an identity layer connecting advertiser and publisher first-party data; a clean room environment for matching and modeling; and an AI orchestration layer that activates the output across the fragmented open internet.
“When you bring all that together — the ability to connect your first party data with a publisher’s behavioral signals — that’s what allows you to solve this addressability problem because you’re now targeting a tranche of signals which are addressable in every single impression,” Root said.
You’re watching coverage from Beet Retreat Berkshires 2026. For more videos from this event, please visit this page.
AMENIA, NY — The advertising industry built itself on the assumption of near-universal consumer addressability. That assumption is yet to be realized. And most of the ecosystem is still catching up to what that means.
“Less than 30% of consumers have an ID. That creates a lot of downstream problems. It forces everyone into the same 30%. Costs go up, performance goes down,” Joe Root, co-founder of Permutive, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at Beet Retreat Berkshires. “When you don’t reach consumers, you can’t sell to them, so incremental sales goes down.”
The causes are well understood: Apple’s privacy changes, the rise of ad blockers, regulatory opt-outs, and the ID-free nature of fast channels. But the industry’s response, Root argued, has been inadequate.
3 consumer profiles, 3 addressability signals
Root frames the addressability challenge through three distinct consumer segments, each requiring a different approach.
The first, somewhere between five and 30% of consumers, remain comfortable with traditional ID-based targeting. But it’s a pool that shrinks every year, Root said.
The second maintains a relationship with a specific media company and consents to data use within that context, enabling behavioral signal matching similar to what Meta does with its own audience. The third has opted out entirely, making contextual targeting the only viable path.
“Those three pillars of ID, first party data or behavioral signal, and contextual signal reform the new addressability pyramid,” Root said.
First party data is working against advertisers
The industry’s consensus answer to identity deprecation — build first-party data assets — turns out to be only half a solution. Matching that data to media inventory in a world where only 30% of impressions carry an ID eliminates most of the scale.
“If I want to go and target against my first party data, I need to make it addressable. Now your first party data, when you match it to the media company, loses all that scale overnight,” Root said. “It’s trapping you in a small pool of consumers where prices are high and performance is much harder to find.”
The better approach, Root contends, is using first-party data as a seed to identify behavioral and contextual signals on the path to purchase. From there, it comes down to targeting those signals rather than the data itself.
Can publishers reach 100% addressability?
When media companies apply first-party data effectively, addressable audiences can expand from roughly 20% of inventory to 100%, a transformation Root has seen play out on the supply side where Permutive started.
“When media companies apply first party data really well, they can take addressable audiences from about 20% of inventory to 100% of inventory. And that’s quite transformational,” Root said.
The infrastructure shift that makes this possible is moving data processing toward the edge, enabling real-time matching that cloud-based models are too slow to support.
Making a functional ecosystem
Root outlined the architecture required to solve addressability at scale: publisher signals consolidated in one place; an identity layer connecting advertiser and publisher first-party data; a clean room environment for matching and modeling; and an AI orchestration layer that activates the output across the fragmented open internet.
“When you bring all that together — the ability to connect your first party data with a publisher’s behavioral signals — that’s what allows you to solve this addressability problem because you’re now targeting a tranche of signals which are addressable in every single impression,” Root said.
You’re watching coverage from Beet Retreat Berkshires 2026. For more videos from this event, please visit this page.
