By Kalyan Lanka, Chief Product Officer, Affinity Solutions
Brands have more data about their customers than ever, and more ways to misunderstand them. First-party data can show who bought, clicked or engaged. But it cannot, on its own, reveal the wider set of behaviors shaping what consumers will do next.
That gap is becoming more consequential as shopping and media fragments across platforms and channels. The marketers who can connect purchase behavior, identity, media exposure and outcomes will be better positioned to find growth and prove what actually drove it.
At Advertising Week New York 2026, I moderated The Consumer Story You’re Missing, a conversation with Keith Petri, SVP, Data and Identity at Viant; Jon Mansell, Vice President, U.S. Revenue, Demand at FreeWheel; and Jake Kastner, Head of Measurement Strategy at Uber Advertising. We centered our discussion on three priorities for marketers: uncovering overlooked audiences, understanding the real opportunity to reach them, and measuring the incremental impact of advertising.
1. Growth Often Hides Outside the Obvious Audience
A brand’s customer file can tell a useful story about the people already buying. It is less equipped to explain what those consumers do elsewhere or which adjacent behaviors could signal the next source of demand.
Kastner brought that idea to life with a counterintuitive finding from Uber Eats: sports fans predictably purchase wings and beer, but they also order açaí bowls 30% more frequently than the average Uber Eats customer. The insight matters because it challenges a familiar audience assumption and creates an opening for brands that might never have placed those consumers on their growth map.
Petri pointed to the value of knowing where consumers shop, what they watch, and how they move across competing or complementary categories, which can reveal high-potential audiences that first-party data alone leaves invisible.
My takeaway: marketers should not limit audience strategy to a rearview mirror of past purchases. Broader behavioral signals can help reveal where demand could emerge next.
2. Audience Value Depends on the Opportunity to Reach It
Identifying a valuable audience is only the first step. Marketers also need to understand how available—and how receptive—that audience is across the media landscape.
Mansell explained that connected TV makes this especially clear. Premium inventory is finite, and ad exposure varies dramatically by household. Some viewers encounter thousands of ads, while others see only a handful each month because they primarily use subscription services with limited advertising.
That scarcity should influence valuation. A rare opportunity to reach a high-value, lightly exposed household may warrant a different investment than one more impression delivered to a viewer already saturated with advertising.
Petri added that connecting identity, viewing behavior and attention signals helps advertisers understand not simply who an audience is, but when that audience is reachable and likely to engage.
As media buying grows more sophisticated, consumer intelligence must shape the full decision: who to pursue, where to find them, when to engage and what each opportunity is worth.
3. Measurement Must Prove What Advertising Changed
One point I kept returning to throughout the conversation was that finding and reaching new audiences only creates value if marketers can show that their investment changed behavior.
That is why the panel returned repeatedly to incrementality. Attribution can show that a purchase followed an ad exposure. Incrementality asks the harder, and more useful, question: would that purchase have happened without the advertising?
Kastner described how Uber Advertising is working with Affinity Solutions to extend that view beyond the Uber platform. By connecting Uber’s test-and-control approach with Affinity’s purchase intelligence, advertisers can evaluate campaign-driven spending both on Uber and at physical restaurant locations.
The results showed why a broader measurement lens matters:
- 40% sales lift on Uber for the campaigns measured.
- 5% incremental sales lift at physical restaurants, revealing an impact beyond the platform where ads appeared.
- Sustained 5% in-restaurant sales lift over six months, demonstrating that the impact extended beyond the campaign period.
A campaign designed to drive transactions on one platform also influenced purchasing elsewhere. Platform-specific reporting alone would have missed a meaningful share of that value.
We also discussed the importance of bringing conversion signals into campaigns while they are still live. When marketers can optimize audiences, creative and media investment against real business performance, measurement becomes a growth tool rather than a post-campaign report card.
The Competitive Advantage Is a Connected Consumer View
The central challenge is not a lack of data. It is fragmentation. Consumers move fluidly across retailers, media environments, and purchasing channels, while the signals marketers use to understand them often remain isolated.
First-party data remains essential, but it becomes far more powerful when connected with broader purchase intelligence, media consumption, identity, and independent measurement. Together, those signals can show how consumers discover, consider and buy, and whether advertising genuinely influenced the outcome.
For marketers, I believe the opportunity is to put that connected view to work across the entire advertising process: uncover audiences competitors may overlook, value media opportunities more intelligently, optimize toward real performance, and measure the incremental outcomes that advertising actually drives.
