Acxiom-eMarketer study: 90% of marketers use identifiers, 23% fully interoperable

August 16, 2026 · thedrum.com

Keith Camoosa, chief product and technology innovation officer at Acxiom, argues that most marketers now recognize identity as central to marketing performance. New research from Acxiom, conducted with eMarketer, found that 90% of marketers use identifiers to recognize customers across channels, more than 80% see positive ROI from their identity efforts, and 61% plan to increase identity investment over the next 24 months. Execution still trails that ambition: just 23% of marketers describe their systems as fully interoperable, 55% call their first-party data siloed or only partially connected, and 25% still lack a formal identity strategy. Only half have built a private identity graph, and just 6% significantly increased first-party data spending since Google's partial reversal on third-party cookie deprecation, though 52% held their investment steady.

Campaigns that lean on a single identifier such as hashed email lose reach the moment a consumer switches devices or sites, and 55% of marketers already report first-party data that's disconnected across systems, which limits how precisely audiences can be built and measured. A fragmented identity foundation carries into every downstream channel and reporting layer, working against measurement and personalization at the point campaigns run. Yory Wurmser, principal analyst at eMarketer, said: "Redundancy is really important in identity resolution." Agencies that push clients toward a private identity graph and interoperable, multi-signal matching gain a customer view that holds up across platforms, partners and the AI-driven tools now shaping targeting decisions.