Marketers have a lot of data at their fingertips. They can build audience strategies from browsing behavior, purchase history, CRM records, contextual signals, location patterns, platform engagement, and more.
Yet the industry’s growing supply of signals has not necessarily created a clearer view of the customer.
According to Blis’ new report, “The New Audience Foundation: Why Carrier Data Is the Future of Audience Strategy,” 54% of U.S. marketers cite data accuracy or representativeness as a leading obstacle to audience targeting. That concern ranks ahead of fragmentation, privacy and signal loss, scale, and transparency of inputs.
Carrier data, or privacy-conscious signals about mobile engagement and real-world movement, offers a better foundation for understanding the people marketers are trying to reach.
Accuracy is a strategic marketing issue
Audience data shapes planning, modeling, activation, optimization, and measurement. If the source data is too narrow, outdated, or incomplete, every decision built on top of it inherits those same limitations.
This is why accuracy has become so important. It determines how well a brand understands the market, where it sees opportunity, and how confidently it can connect media investment to outcomes.
The challenge is that many brands are still trying to understand whole people through partial signals. A retailer may know what someone bought, a streaming platform may know what they watched, a website may know they visited once, and a social platform may know what they liked.
Each signal has value, but each captures only one part of a much larger pattern of behavior.
Consumers do not live in channels
People move between apps, stores, screens, websites, neighborhoods, commute routes, and purchase environments throughout the day. They discover in one place, research in another, encounter advertising somewhere else, and make decisions across both digital and physical contexts.
Audience strategies often fail when they treat those moments as separate. The report found that 67% of U.S. marketers agree many audience datasets are built on siloed signals, leaving brands with a fragmented view of the customer journey.
That fragmentation has consequences. It may lead brands to define audiences too narrowly or repeatedly reach the same visible consumers while missing incremental audiences. They may struggle to understand whether media exposure contributed to consideration, store visitation, sales, or other outcomes.
Marketers should start with a simple question: “Which signals give us the most accurate, durable view of how people actually behave?”
Carrier data offers a stronger behavioral foundation
The smartphone has become the connective tissue of modern life. It is the device people carry as they move through the world, engage with apps, consume media, navigate daily routines, and make decisions.
Carrier data, when used responsibly and with strong privacy safeguards, can help marketers understand repeated patterns of behavior across digital and physical environments.
While siloed data offers snapshots, carrier data enables audience intelligence. That means understanding how behavior, movement, app engagement, and real-world context combine to reveal interests, intent, and opportunity. This is especially relevant now, as automated systems are playing a larger role in how audiences are modeled, expanded, and activated.
AI will only increase the importance of source quality. The report found that 58% of U.S. marketers expect AI-generated or synthetic audience signals to have a major impact on targeting capabilities over the next two to three years. But AI cannot fix weak inputs. If automated systems are trained on incomplete or unrepresentative signals, they will scale those limitations faster, and accuracy will continue to suffer.
Forward-thinking marketers are beginning to recognize this. The report found that 59% say carrier signals would be very or extremely valuable to their organization, and 71% agree carrier data has the potential to become an important signal for future omnichannel advertising.
The direction forward is clear. The next phase of audience strategy is about who can build the most accurate, durable, and behavior-based understanding of the people they want to reach.
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Ariel Deitz is a sales leader at Blis, part of T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, where she works closely with brands and agencies to help them better understand the people and behaviors behind the data. Across her career in digital media, programmatic advertising, and client partnerships, Ariel has helped marketers connect audience intelligence to more effective planning, activation, and measurement strategies.