Every few years, the industry slips into a new outfit, calls it “the future,” and insists this time it’s different.

AI copilots.

Shoppable TV.

Retail media ecosystems so over-diagrammed they resemble urban planning disasters. Panels are booked. Decks are shared. LinkedIn fills with people announcing they’ve never been more excited.

And yet, beneath all of it, the same truth keeps floating back to the surface like it refuses to stay buried:

If you don’t control identity, you don’t control outcomes.

Everything else is commentary.

That’s why IntentIQ matters. And that’s why so many people talk around it instead of about it.

AI is a tool.
CTV is distribution.
Retail media is leverage pretending to be innovation.

Identity is power.

Identity determines whether an impression is recognized or orphaned, whether targeting is precise or reduced to probabilistic guesswork, whether measurement reflects reality or an elaborate confidence game. You can automate media plans and personalize creative all day long, but if you can’t reliably and compliantly recognize an audience, you’re just shouting into a storm with better typography.

IntentIQ didn’t stumble into this realization. It was built around it.

Roy Shkedi has been explicit for years: IntentIQ has been working on the identity problem for over fifteen years. “This is our core,” he’s said. “We’re really a technology company at heart.” Not an add-on. Not a wrapper. The load-bearing beam.

And the anchor isn’t a clever workaround. It’s the consumer. In Shkedi’s framing, what’s good for the consumer is what’s good for the industry. That’s where the system starts, and that’s where it ends. Consent isn’t a compliance box you check later. It’s the condition under which identity can exist at all.

That idea sounds polite until you realize how many adtech business models quietly depend on pretending it isn’t true.

IntentIQ didn’t arrive last year waving an LLM and calling it destiny. This isn’t a “we renamed the same thing and added AI” story.

They were building probabilistic cross-device identity back when most of the industry treated it like a necessary sin. Useful, yes. Dinner-party friendly, no. The kind of work you did quietly while everyone else talked about cookies like they were immortal.

Then cookies started dying in public.

Safari first.
iOS tightening the screws.
Firefox nodding along politely.
CTV adding new layers of confusion.
MAIDs wobbling.
Regulators circling.

For much of adtech, this triggered panic and frantic repositioning. For IntentIQ, it triggered something closer to silence. Because when the ground shifts, the people who already built underground don’t need to explain why they brought shovels.

Today, cookieless traffic isn’t a corner case. It is the market. And identity is what separates traffic that monetizes from traffic that merely exists.

Shkedi doesn’t romanticize this. He reduces it to arithmetic. Targeted advertising accounts for roughly 50 to 70 percent of a typical publisher’s revenue, he’s noted. That revenue comes from ads targeted using information collected across websites and apps. That’s where identity lives.

When identity breaks, publishers don’t lose efficiency. They lose viability.

The most uncomfortable example is the one everyone knows but rarely says out loud:

The same user can generate roughly three times more ad revenue on Android than on iOS
even though, as Shkedi has pointed out, the average household income of iOS users is about 40 percent higher.

That gap isn’t taste. It’s identity failure.

IntentIQ exists to close that gap. And closing that gap makes people nervous.

Calling IntentIQ an Israeli powerhouse isn’t a geopolitical statement. It’s an engineering one.

Israeli adtech culture tends to be unsentimental and defensive by default. It assumes systems will break, partners will disappoint, and dominant players will eventually try to erase you. The response isn’t optimism. It’s preparation. Build early. Protect aggressively. Don’t rely on goodwill as a strategy.

That mindset shows up everywhere in IntentIQ’s posture:

The obsession with durability.
The fixation on compliance.
The seriousness around IP.

This is not a company that grew up in an ecosystem that rewards charm. It grew up in one that rewards being right early and still standing later.

One of the most revealing aspects of IntentIQ’s approach is how it handles consent in real time.

In cookieless web environments, the system doesn’t guess and doesn’t retrofit compliance after the fact. It literally picks up the consent signal in real time from the site. Accepted consent and rejected consent are handled side by side.

As Shkedi has put it plainly, “You cannot be more compliant than that.”

Once consent exists, the technology IntentIQ has been building for more than a decade quietly does its work in the background, tying signals together without ever knowing who the actual person is. Privacy is maintained. Identity still functions. Revenue still flows.

That’s the trick. And it’s not rhetorical.

This is the polite version of the story. The version that explains why IntentIQ matters without unpacking what that power costs, who resents it, or how patents, standards, and infrastructure collide when identity becomes a choke point.

That part lives behind the paywall.

Because that’s where incentives stop being abstract, power stops being theoretical, and consequences stop being hypothetical.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

You just read the polite version.

The ADOTAT+ side is where this stops being biography and starts being power analysis. The parts you didn’t see are the uncomfortable ones: how patent enforcement quietly slows roadmaps, why Snowflake wasn’t a partnership but a positional coup, which platforms paid quickly and which blinked late, and how identity moved from “vendor feature” to de facto governance layer.

Free readers get the story arc.
ADOTAT+ readers get the leverage map.

If you want to understand how identity stopped being plumbing and started being rent, that’s behind the paywall.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.