Every enterprise CMO’s paid media program carries a significant budget line for data onboarding agreements with partners like LiveRamp. Many sign those agreements without fully understanding how the infrastructure works, only that they can’t live without it. 

For programs built on one, the data onboarding solution quickly evolves from a specialized tool to the entire foundation for addressable advertising activation. It’s the infrastructure for suppression lists, lookalike seeds, and cross-device attribution that closes the loop between spend and conversion. This wide-reaching impact fuels its stickiness: leaders fear operational disruption, reduced reach, and diminishing performance if they switch platforms. The pull isn’t loyalty to any one vendor; it’s that no viable alternative has existed to ease switching anxieties.

As the DMP era began to unravel in early 2020, every walled garden and retail media network hardened into its own island of addressability, and a gap opened between the first-party data brands activated and the fragmented destinations where audiences lived. First-party data activation became the baseline strategy, and data onboarders, already the connective tissue spanning the gap between brand data and publisher destinations, deepened their market position as the category consolidated.

Every DSP, CDP, and martech vendor has tried to close the gap between a brand’s customer data and scaled advertising activation. None succeeded, because they didn't have the right data. The onboarding provider’s moat was never platform architecture. It was the identity graph: the breadth of match keys, the digital ID spine, and the publisher relationships built over a decade.

Until now.

Among a litany of AI-forward announcements this year, Salesforce quietly launched what may be its first complete solution for enterprise addressable advertising. It’s live in production today. The reason it works, where every previous attempt didn’t, is a partnership with a technology, data, and identity provider that advertising leaders have relied on for years, and one that finally brings third-party identity and data to Salesforce. That partner is dentsu.

Identity infrastructure has become a strategic prize rather than a utility. Brands need identity-first activation built directly into platforms they own. Salesforce already had the infrastructure pieces in place: Data Cloud for unified first-party data, Ad Audiences for activation, and a clean room for privacy-safe collaboration. What it lacked was the data bridge that makes match rates meaningful. Without it, first-party audiences pushed to Meta or Trade Desk were only as addressable as a hashed email list would allow. The Identity Boost Accelerator is Salesforce’s latest answer.  
 

Greater Match Rates for Existing Audiences 

Identity Boost brings dentsu identity data natively into Data Cloud, enriching first-party records with personal emails, mobile phone numbers, MAIDs, and tokenized digital IDs at the point of activation. On datasets where mobile numbers are sparse, phone coverage alone can increase by up to 2.5x. The results are clear: match rates that typically run 30 to 50% on hashed email alone move to 60 to 80% on the same underlying audience.

Greater Match Rates with Wider Reach and Precision

Identity Boost also changes activation economics. Richer identity keys expand deterministic reach across walled gardens, so brands typically reach more real people as addressability goes up. Identity Boost adds precision: by collapsing fragmented records into a single verified person, it stops brands from targeting the same individual across three device profiles as if they were three separate prospects. Salesforce built the scaffolding, and dentsu's enrichment capabilities drive addressable advertising activation. 

 
Greater Addressability with Data Custody Controls

Identity Boost activates without ever taking custody of the data. Dentsu’s third-party identity keys are resolved in real time at the point of activation and passed straight to the destination channel. They’re never persisted, never exposed, and never queryable inside the platform. For enterprise buyers whose 2026 mandate is managing speed and scale within governed data activation, this is a key requirement.
 

Bigger Than Match Rates: The Clean Room Unlock

Salesforce Data Cloud’s clean room enables privacy-safe overlap queries between two first-party datasets without either party exposing raw records. Currently, these scaled data partnerships are only as valuable as the shared identifiers that run through them, leaving massive addressable reach untapped. When a brand with two million CRM records collaborates with a publisher running ten million, the overlap is limited to shared identifiers, typically a hashed email. In practice, that surfaces just 300,000 matches from a possible two million. The rest is invisible.

Identity Boost enriches both datasets with additional match keys natively inside the platform before the query runs, materially expanding the overlap surface area. That same two-million-record dataset may now find 700,000 or 900,000 clean room matches, not because the brand acquired new customers, but because the identity layer now recognizes relationships that previously looked like strangers. For executives and practitioners who’ve been asked to justify the clean room and struggled to show results, this is the unlock they’ve been waiting for.

The financial case is straightforward: a separate data onboarder contract, data egress costs, and standalone clean room licensing can all be reduced with a Salesforce-native alternative. Brands no longer need to pay a premium to a third-party intermediary just to activate their own customer audiences reliably. For clients approaching their next data onboarder renewal, a cost-effective alternative now exists.

The primary reason some groups may hold out is not because of perceptions of publisher or audience reach, but due to contractual entanglements. Moving from a legacy onboarder entails a platform migration without significant rebuild; the audiences and publisher data are recoverable. Brands on Salesforce who adopt the Identity Boost Accelerator can access their third-party audiences and data from the dentsu publisher and media ecosystem. For brands already on Data Cloud with active paid media programs, Identity Boost starts with an AppExchange installation and a dentsu data agreement.

Merkle/dentsu is running Identity Boost in production now. The architecture is sound, and the partnership between the Salesforce platform and identity provider is real. If you’re evaluating your addressable advertising and identity stack or want to understand how the Identity Boost Accelerator can provide enhancement or cost savings, please reach out. We’d love to hear what you’re building toward.