This article was originally published on ANA.net on June 9, 2025.
Marketers have spent years chasing the consumer across devices, platforms, and channels. Omnichannel strategies, identity graphs, and measurement frameworks all aim to capture what we call “the journey”—a sequence of media consumption experiences that signals interest or intent and, ideally, ends in a transaction.
The issue is that the entire notion of “cross-platform” or “omnichannel” misses the more decisive moments.
Real customer journeys aren’t made of impressions. They’re made of actions, like booking a flight, hailing a ride, checking into a hotel, or redeeming a perk at a concert. Most of those moments happen in another brand’s environment. And while media platforms may help guide attention, they rarely determine the outcome. The truly valuable signals—the ones that mark commitment or conversion—belong to other brands, and live within their first-party data.
Retail Media Shines a Light on the Real Signal
The most meaningful insight doesn’t come from content exposure—it comes from real-world behavior. This is the premise behind retail media, the fastest-growing media channel today. A purchase at a pharmacy, a loyalty swipe at a gas station, a repeat order at a QSR chain—these are not soft signals. They are high-intent, behaviorally rich, and often more predictive of future action than anything that media consumption can provide.
As Eric Seufert has put it, “everything is an ad network.” Any app, retailer, or platform with audience data can monetize it through advertising, and many do. But ads are only one way to capture the value of those signals. What brands increasingly need isn’t another ad network—it’s a data network: a way to make first-party intelligence actionable beyond the walls where it was generated.
That requires collaboration. No single brand has enough data to reflect the full customer journey. Yet, even as interest in data collaboration grows, the most actionable signals remain stuck inside closed systems. The technical and operational barriers to sharing data securely and efficiently at scale are still significant, and they’ve shaped a landscape where even forward-looking brands struggle to make collaboration routine.
The Infrastructure for That Doesn’t Exist Yet
Today, most data collaboration efforts are limited to one-off arrangements. Direct API integrations, while technically feasible, are time-consuming and brittle. They’ve worked in specific cases—say, between an airline and a hotel chain—but they’re not scalable across the broader ecosystem.
Clean rooms were introduced as a more flexible solution. By offering a neutral environment for anonymized data sharing, they promised privacy-safe collaboration. In practice, however, clean rooms have added new friction. Complex onboarding, high operational costs, and limited transparency all contribute to an experience that is rarely turnkey. Identity resolution is typically a bolt-on, and activation often delivers little more than aggregated, delayed results.
This is why clean rooms are increasingly being folded into other parts of the stack. Whether bundled into marketing clouds, identity providers, holdcos, or media sellers, they no longer stand alone. Their value is conditional—dependent on the broader architecture that surrounds them—and they often deliver more benefit to the host than to the participant.
The result is a system in which expensive and high-effort collaboration infrastructure serves intermediaries first. The brands generating the data are left with delayed reporting, limited reusability, and few lasting advantages.
What Brands Need Is a Shared Fabric
The alternative isn’t another round of bespoke integrations. It’s persistent, permissioned infrastructure, a shared fabric that allows brands to connect once and collaborate dynamically.
This fabric would allow data to move where it’s useful, governed by identity, policy, and consent rather than by static contracts or closed environments. It wouldn’t require brands to give up control or margin. Instead, it would create pathways for shared value—enabling participants to activate their data where it’s relevant, not just where it’s stored.
In this model, cross-brand collaboration becomes systematic. A traveler booking a flight could be reached with a timely rideshare offer. A student verifying their status could be eligible for targeted benefits across retail, finance, and telecom. These interactions don’t rely on bespoke deals. They rely on infrastructure that makes the signal portable.
Building Toward a Brand-Centric Network
The next phase of customer intelligence won’t be won by those who collect the most data, but by those who can enrich and activate it through trusted, interoperable systems. That means moving from a framework designed for ad impressions to one designed for commercial intent, from a platform-centric model to a brand-driven network.
Retail media has demonstrated the value of brand-owned data. The folding of clean rooms into broader stacks has shown the limits of standalone tools. What’s missing is infrastructure that enables durable, efficient, privacy-compliant collaboration at scale.
Because the customer journey doesn’t just cross channels or devices; it crosses brands. And until we treat that journey as a shared experience, supported by shared infrastructure, we’ll continue to leave its value on the table.