Google finally killed third-party cookies in Chrome. Depending on who you ask, that either happened quietly last year or is still “happening” in slow motion, with opt-outs and delays that made the whole thing feel anticlimactic. Either way, the addressable advertising model brands built for two decades is gone. The question nobody has fully answered: what replaces it at scale? Telecom-based identity solutions, like the one myGaru is building, might be the sturdiest answer yet, and most media buyers haven’t priced it in.
The Identity Gap Nobody Wants to Admit
Every “cookieless” solution pitched over the past three years has had a catch. Google’s Privacy Sandbox got gutted by its own creator. Universal IDs like UID2 rely on email hashes that only work where users log in. Contextual targeting is fine, but it’s a step backward for anyone who built performance programs on behavioral precision. Clean rooms solve for collaboration, not identity itself.
Telecom carriers sit on something none of these alternatives have: a persistent, verified relationship with nearly every adult consumer, tied to a real subscriber contract. That’s not a cookie that expires in 24 hours or a hashed email that changes when someone switches providers. It’s the closest thing to a stable, cross-device identity key that still respects consent frameworks.
Telecom identity graphs are built on subscriber relationships that already require legal identity verification, giving brands a signal more durable than any cookie or device ID ever was.
What myGaru and Telecom Identity Actually Do
myGaru’s model, broadly typical of telecom-based identity plays, resolves consumer identity through mobile network operator data rather than browser signals. Carriers already know who a subscriber is (verified at sign-up), what device they use, and increasingly, with consent, patterns of app and web behavior across that device. Package that into a privacy-compliant identity layer, and you get something advertisers can plug into programmatic pipes without touching cookies at all.
This isn’t new in concept. Telcos have flirted with ad tech for over a decade (remember Verizon’s AOL/Yahoo experiment?). What’s different now is timing. Brands are desperate for durable identity, regulators have made consent infrastructure mandatory anyway, and telcos have finally built the consent-management layers needed to monetize their data responsibly.
- Subscriber identity is verified at contract signup, not self-reported.
- Carrier-level data persists across apps, browsers, and devices tied to one account.
- Consent can be captured once, at the network level, rather than app-by-app.
- Cross-border roaming data adds a layer travel and hospitality brands can’t get elsewhere.
Why This Matters More Than Another Cookie Replacement
Most cookieless solutions try to recreate what cookies did. Telecom identity does something structurally different: it starts from a verified real-world identity and works outward. That distinction matters for brand teams thinking about identity resolution as a foundation for AI-driven media buying, not just a patch for lost targeting.
Consider frequency capping. Cookie-based systems have always struggled here because the same person shows up as five different IDs across devices and browsers. Telecom identity collapses that into one subscriber record. Suddenly frequency capping, sequential messaging, and incrementality testing become dramatically more accurate. That’s not a marginal improvement. For brands running eight-figure media budgets, better frequency management alone can shift ROAS by double digits.
There’s also the fraud angle. FTC guidance on ad fraud and deceptive practices increasingly pressures brands to show real, verifiable audiences, not bot traffic dressed up as impressions. A telecom-verified identity graph is much harder to spoof than a synthetic cookie ID, because it’s anchored to a billing relationship a fraudster can’t fabricate at scale.
The Regulatory Tightrope
Here’s the part brand safety and legal teams need to sit with: telecom data is some of the most sensitive personal data that exists. Location, call patterns, browsing behavior tied to a real identity, this is a regulatory minefield if handled carelessly. GDPR in the EU and evolving US state privacy laws (California, Colorado, and others layering on requirements) all treat telecom-derived data with extra scrutiny.
That’s actually myGaru’s selling point, not its liability. Telcos already operate under some of the strictest data protection obligations of any industry. They’ve spent years building consent infrastructure most ad tech companies are only now scrambling to replicate. Brands partnering with telecom identity providers inherit that compliance maturity, provided they do proper due diligence on data provenance and consent chains.
Brands should treat telecom identity vendors the way they’d treat a payment processor: verify the compliance paperwork before you verify the CPMs.
Practically, this means procurement and legal teams need a new checklist item: ask any telecom identity vendor exactly how consent is captured, how long it persists, and whether it’s portable across the specific carriers you need coverage from. Coverage fragmentation, where one vendor only has strong data in certain countries or carrier networks, is the most likely operational headache in the near term.
Where the ROI Case Gets Real
Skeptical CMOs should ask a fair question: is this better than just leaning harder into retail media networks or first-party data clean rooms? The honest answer is that telecom identity isn’t a replacement for those strategies. It’s a complementary layer that solves a different problem: reach outside your owned ecosystem.
Retail media and first-party CRM data are extraordinary for people who’ve already bought from you. Telecom identity helps you find and measure the people who haven’t yet, at a scale contextual targeting can’t match and without relying on Google or Meta’s walled gardens for the identity layer. That’s a genuinely different value proposition, and it’s why performance marketers testing it are seeing incremental reach rather than cannibalized reach.
Early telecom identity pilots reported by eMarketer point to a pattern worth watching: advertisers using carrier-based identity for addressable video and CTV campaigns are seeing completion rates and frequency efficiency comparable to logged-in ID solutions, but with wider reach because coverage isn’t gated behind an app login. That combination, broad reach plus verified identity, is rare enough to justify testing budget even for teams that are cookie-fatigued and skeptical of the next “solution.”
For agencies managing multiple brand accounts, there’s an operational upside too. One identity layer that works consistently across CTV, mobile web, and in-app inventory reduces the reconciliation headache of stitching together five fragmented ID solutions per campaign. That’s real time saved for trafficking teams, and it’s the kind of efficiency gain that shows up in agency margin, not just campaign performance.
What Brands Should Actually Do Right Now
Don’t wait for a “final” cookieless standard. There isn’t going to be one. The market is settling into a multi-identity reality where telecom-based graphs, retail media data, contextual signals, and clean-room collaborations all coexist. Brands that build flexible measurement stacks now will out-execute the ones waiting for a single silver bullet.
- Run a controlled pilot with a telecom identity vendor in one market, measuring incrementality against your current programmatic mix.
- Push legal to formalize a consent-verification checklist specific to telecom data providers before scaling spend.
- Build measurement models that can ingest multiple identity sources without requiring a single deterministic ID, since unified attribution tooling increasingly supports probabilistic blending.
- Reassess frequency capping and sequential messaging strategy once cross-device identity improves, because the old assumptions about reach and waste no longer hold.
This shift also connects to a broader theme playing out across the industry: attribution and identity infrastructure are getting more budget priority than raw content spend, a trend covered in depth in coverage of how AI budgets favor attribution over creative production right now. Telecom identity fits squarely into that shift. It’s infrastructure, not a campaign tactic, and it should be budgeted and evaluated that way.
The parallel to influencer and creator measurement is worth drawing out too. Brands have already learned, sometimes painfully, that vanity reach without verified identity and attribution is a dead end, a lesson explored in pieces on why sales-attributed reporting is replacing follower-count logic. Addressable advertising is having its own version of that reckoning. Reach without verifiable, consented identity is just noise, no matter which channel it’s coming from.
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What is telecom-based identity in advertising?
Telecom-based identity uses data from mobile network operators, such as verified subscriber accounts and device relationships, to create a consented identity layer advertisers can use for targeting and measurement without relying on browser cookies.
How is myGaru different from cookie-based targeting?
myGaru and similar telecom identity providers anchor identity to a verified carrier subscription rather than a browser cookie, which means the identifier persists across devices and doesn’t expire or get blocked by browser privacy settings.
Is telecom identity data compliant with privacy regulations?
It can be, provided vendors maintain strict consent-capture processes. Telecom companies already operate under heavy regulatory scrutiny for subscriber data, and reputable identity partners build consent management directly into their data pipelines, but brands should independently verify consent chains before scaling spend.
Will telecom identity fully replace third-party cookies?
No single solution is replacing cookies outright. Telecom identity is one layer in a broader mix that includes retail media data, contextual targeting, and first-party clean rooms. Brands are moving toward blended, probabilistic identity strategies rather than one deterministic standard.
What industries benefit most from telecom-based addressable advertising?
Travel, telecom, automotive, financial services, and CTV/streaming advertisers see the strongest early results, largely because these categories need cross-device reach and frequency accuracy at scale, which telecom identity handles better than fragmented cookie-based systems.
Next step: Run a small, measurable pilot with a telecom identity partner in one market this quarter, benchmark it against your current programmatic stack, and let incrementality data, not vendor promises, decide whether it earns a bigger share of your addressable budget.
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