How composable identity unlocks cross-departmental performance
Sponsored by Adstra • May 30, 2025 •
Patrick Roman Gut, svp, head of new business, Adstra
Modern business relies heavily on the concept of identity and understanding customers and their preferences. The most common proving ground for the concept of identity has long been advertising. Marketers were the first to demand real-time resolution of individuals across platforms, devices and environments. That pressure forced innovation.
Now, many brands operate advanced identity stacks designed to power targeting, personalization and attribution. These systems are functional, accurate and deeply embedded in campaign workflows — but rarely designed for broader enterprise use.
Advertising identity typically lives on external platforms, tuned for the media supply chain. It operates at the point of bid, often outside of the company’s owned environment, and seldom integrates with internal systems. The infrastructure that enables effective campaigns is not built to support sales teams, revenue managers, loyalty operations or analysts. It performs in isolation.
How marketing serves as the backbone for organizational success
Marketing has become the center of excellence for identity within most organizations. It’s often the only department where person-level resolution is operationalized at scale. That capability, while mature, remains locked inside the advertising function. Meanwhile, the rest of the business continues working with fragmented, often outdated approaches to understanding the customer.
Many of the most valuable business functions — revenue management, sales, loyalty and analytics — depend on the same core requirement: the ability to recognize individuals accurately across systems and contexts.
Composable identity infrastructure provides the mechanism to meet that requirement. Composability decouples identity capabilities from a fixed set of applications, allowing them to be reused across environments. Organizations can then extend what’s already working without rebuilding from scratch.
Composable identity is positively impacting teams beyond marketing
This shift is already taking shape in enterprise deployments. In travel and hospitality, composable identity infrastructure connects pricing strategy with behavioral context, helping revenue teams manage elasticity and dynamic offers with greater precision. These pricing models were never intended to interact with media systems. Now, they don’t need to. Composability enables identity to move between teams, toolsets and environments, unifying customer understanding without centralizing every function.
In the automotive industry, sales teams use identity infrastructure to surface real-time propensity scores and engagement profiles as customers arrive online or on-premises. The technical model is similar to what powers campaign targeting, with differences in deployment. With composability, the same identity truth set can be activated inside the dealership as easily as inside a DSP.
Guest services in hospitality rely on continuity across properties and platforms. Loyalty teams need to understand preferences, upgrades and behaviors over time. When identity is composable, data from franchise systems, mobile apps and service desks is resolved to the same individual, creating a coherent experience at the point of service and deepening retention across the customer lifecycle.
There are also operational gains. Offer abuse, eligibility verification and resource allocation all benefit from real-time identity resolution. In these cases, the need isn’t marketing efficiency, but fraud mitigation, cost control and service optimization. Composability makes the identity infrastructure built for advertising available to these other functions in a format they can use and trust.
Even long-term planning improves. Teams responsible for branch expansion, product development or territory strategy depend on behavioral and demographic insight. When composable identity links those insights across digital and physical environments, decision-making becomes more grounded in real customer data. Analytics becomes an application of identity, not a parallel practice.
Composability as an enabler of flexibility and portability
Portability — the ability to transfer or carry data from one system or team to another — is not the differentiator alone. Many identity solutions promise reach across environments. What matters is how identity moves. The future relies on the ability to travel across systems without replatforming, duplication or vendor lock-in. Composability makes that possible. It means identity can be integrated with modern data infrastructure, deployed in clean rooms, used in notebooks and applied to use cases that live outside of media.
This is not a theoretical future. Enterprise data strategies already center around platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. For identity to remain useful, it must operate inside these systems. That means being composable enough to be called, resolved and connected wherever customer data lives.
Advertising drove early innovation because the commercial need was immediate. That created systems that work, but don’t transfer. The next phase of identity is about extending that investment across the enterprise. Composability is how that happens.
Most enterprises still operate without access to the identity infrastructure marketing teams use every day. Sales, loyalty and analytics teams are not overserved — they’re underconnected. The companies that act now won’t need to replace what they have. They’ll be able to extend it.
Composability is the method. Portability is the outcome. Enterprise alignment is the goal.
Sponsored by Adstra
https://digiday.com/?p=579748
