Today, Narrative is excited to announce our Composable Identity partnership with Hightouch—a Snowflake-native platform that enables enterprise marketers and media networks to build, own, and activate custom identity graphs by combining first-party data with 30+ third-party providers directly in Snowflake. This complements Hightouch’s Adaptive Identity Resolution, which enables enterprises to create flexible identity graphs using their first-party data by bringing in third-party data sources to enrich customer profiles.
Through this partnership, complex enterprises and media networks can create identity graphs enriched by third-party data, which allows them to improve personalization and audience reach across their advertising channels. Instead of being forced to choose between expensive and inflexible black-box identity vendors or using first-party data alone, businesses can compose their ideal identity graph using the best providers for their specific use cases and then use that graph to target addressable audiences across digital, paid media, and lifecycle channels.
Why existing third-party identity solutions trap businesses in impossible trade-offs
Enterprise marketers and media networks have been forced into unsatisfactory third-party identity solutions that force impossible trade-offs between coverage, cost, and usability.
Single-vendor solutions limit coverage, but multi-vendor approaches create expensive duplication. No identity provider offers perfect coverage across all the identity assets complex businesses need—whether that's credit card transaction tokens for offline attribution, comprehensive demographic data for premium targeting, or robust coverage in EMEA and APAC regions. Unfortunately, when enterprises need to supplement their primary identity provider with additional datasets, they're often forced to purchase the entire dataset from another provider, paying for duplicative identity services when they only need specific incremental data.
Identity investments don’t drive much value without activation. Sophisticated third-party identity solutions typically offer only basic activation options—typically to a handful of advertising destinations and simple file exports. Even traditional onboarders with extensive integration catalogs only focus on paid media. This prevents marketing teams from leveraging their identity investment across the full spectrum of customer experiences, from on-site personalization to lifecycle marketing to media monetization.
Fragmented systems create compliance nightmares. Even when enterprises do successfully cobble together identity providers and activation pipelines, they create a complex web of governance challenges that are impossible to manage effectively. Identity vendors restrict usage to specific use-cases, privacy laws require that data is stored regionally, and customer opt-outs must be honored consistently across channels. This fragmentation makes it extremely difficult to prevent data misuse or compliance failures.
The result of all of these challenges? Businesses either accept limited identity coverage, pay premium prices for duplicative services and narrow activation options, or take on unnecessary complexity and risk.
"We see enterprises struggling with the same identity challenge over and over—they need sophisticated identity resolution with third-party data to compete, but traditional vendors force them into expensive, inflexible contracts that create more problems than they solve. The future belongs to companies that can build and own their identity graphs in their own data cloud while maintaining the flexibility to activate across their entire marketing stack. That's exactly what Hightouch and Narrative deliver together on Snowflake."
— David Wells, Industry Principal, Media, Entertainment & Advertising at Snowflake
What makes Composable Identity different
Hightouch's partnership with Narrative eliminates traditional identity trade-offs by giving customers the tools to build custom multi-provider identity graphs in Snowflake that can be activated across 250+ marketing channels. With built-in governance at every layer of the stack, privacy teams can rest easy knowing that data won’t be misused or shared without consent.
Build identity graphs using first-party data and multiple third-party providers. Fill critical identity gaps by combining first-party data with 30+ specialized identity providers to build a custom identity graph that you control in Snowflake. Access credit card tokens for offline attribution, append emails and device IDs for higher match rates, and leverage regional providers for global reach—paying only for the incremental data you need.
Personalize experiences and improve reach across 250+ marketing channels. Use Hightouch to visually build and activate audiences from your identity graph across web, mobile, email, and paid media platforms. Drive digital and lifecycle personalization using enriched customer attributes. Boost media performance and monetization with better match rates for audience targeting, suppression, and conversion API optimization.
Manage risk and liability with automated governance at every layer. Narrative automates third-party data usage controls, Snowflake ensures data is stored and processed regionally, and Hightouch manages automated consent, creating comprehensive guardrails that reduce the risk of data misuse while ensuring global compliance across every use case.
"The enterprise identity market has been broken by vendors who want to own your data and limit how you use it. We built Composable Identity because enterprises should control their identity graphs in their own infrastructure. But ownership without activation is just expensive data storage. Our partnership with Hightouch gives you transparent identity resolution combined with sophisticated orchestration capabilities to actually put that data to work across your entire marketing stack."
— Tim Mahlman, CEO of Narrative
How it works
Create, orchestrate, and activate your identity graph through a three-step process that happens entirely within your Snowflake environment.
1. Compose your third-party identity graph with multiple providers
Use Narrative's marketplace to combine first-party data with third-party identity providers that meet your specific needs. The identity graph you create can support three core capabilities:
Entity resolution - Connect fragmented customer data across devices, touchpoints, and offline interactions by stitching together emails, phones, MAIDs, cookies, and credit card tokens into unified customer profiles and household clusters.
Third-party data enrichment - Append demographic, behavioral, and intent data to customer profiles for granular segmentation, lookalike modeling, and personalized targeting across channels.
Data onboarding - Enhance match rates by appending additional identifiers to customer profiles or converting between identifier types to meet specific platform requirements, such as translating emails to CTV IDs for targeting audiences across Smart TVs and streaming platforms.
2. Curate custom audiences from your identity graph
Build sophisticated audience segments and customer journeys using your enriched identity graph directly in Snowflake. Hightouch's visual audience builder operates in your Snowflake environment, enabling fast and easy data orchestration through a marketing-friendly interface.
Create complex audiences like "High-value customers who haven't purchased in 90 days, live in households with $75K+ income, and have shown interest in premium products" using your complete identity dataset.
3. Activate audiences with enhanced match rates across 250+ channels
Deploy your identity-enhanced audiences across web, mobile, and email platforms in just a few clicks. Sync audiences and conversion events to paid media platforms using incremental identifiers from your identity graph. Reach more of your target audience, suppress more active customers, and optimize bidding and decisioning algorithms with better conversion signals.
How customers use Composable Identity
Composable Identity is particularly powerful for complex B2C enterprises that need third-party identity resolution to drive omnichannel customer experiences and enhance advertising addressability.
Media networks increase advertiser value and CPM-based revenue
Media networks often struggle with limited audience addressability and shallow customer insights that limit campaign rates and scale. First-party engagement data alone can't provide the demographic, behavioral, and intent signals that brand advertisers need to provide premium targeting options, while incomplete identity resolution limits audience reach and scale.
With Composable Identity, media networks can enrich audience profiles with household demographics, purchase intent signals, and lifestyle data from multiple providers while expanding identity coverage with additional emails, IP addresses, and device identifiers.
They can then use Hightouch's Composable CDP to curate and activate premium audience segments like "high-income households interested in luxury goods" to advertisers through their onsite ad server and across SSPs, DSPs, and walled gardens—driving higher CPMs and expanding monetization opportunities.
Retailers and QSRs unify customer experiences across all touchpoints
Omnichannel retailers and QSRs struggle to connect fragmented customer interactions across channels. Without proper identity resolution, a loyalty member who orders through the mobile app, browses products on the website, and pays with a credit card in-store appears as three separate customers.
With Composable Identity, a coffee chain can connect in-store purchases to loyalty memberships through credit card tokens, link mobile engagements through device IDs, then match those profiles to household IP addresses for CTV targeting. Then they can use Hightouch to activate segments like "premium product browsers who primarily purchase espresso drinks in-store but haven't tried the new seasonal menu" across email promotions, mobile push notifications, and streaming CTV ads to drive cross-sell revenue at every touchpoint.
Ready to build and activate your identity graph?
Traditional third-party identity solutions force impossible trade-offs between coverage, cost, and compliance risk. Narrative’sHightouch’s Composable Identity partnership with Hightouch’sNarrative's Composable CDPIdentity solution eliminates those tradeoffs with a Composable Identity and activation solution on Snowflake.
Whether you're a media network seeking to increase ad revenue through stronger match rates or a QSR looking to unify customer experiences across touchpoints, Composable Identity provides the flexibility and transparency that complex enterprises demand.
To learn more about Composable Identity with Narrative, book a demo with our team.