Hightouch, the leading data and AI agent platform for marketers, announced a strategic partnership with Narrative I/O, the leader in data collaboration. The collaboration empowers marketers and media networks to build and manage identity graphs by combining their own first-party data with insights from over 30 third-party identity providers-directly within Snowflake-and activate those audiences at scale across more than 250 marketing channels, all while maintaining strict data governance.
Today’s marketers face growing challenges around addressability as signal loss and stricter privacy regulations reshape the advertising ecosystem. To solve this, they need broader consented ID coverage and a cost-conscious model that eliminates duplication while relying only on the strongest, most reliable linkages. The Hightouch–Narrative I/O partnership meets that need by uniting data, governance, and activation in one flexible, composable framework.
“The enterprise identity market has been broken by vendors who want to own your data and limit how you use it,” said Tim Mahlman, CEO of Narrative I/O. “We built Composable Identity because enterprises should control their identity graphs in their own infrastructure. But ownership without activation is just expensive data storage. Our partnership with Hightouch gives you a transparent identity graph combined with sophisticated orchestration capabilities to actually put that data to work across your entire marketing and advertising stack.”
This partnership underscores a broader industry shift: enterprises are moving away from closed, monolithic identity solutions and toward composable, cloud-native approaches that deliver transparency, flexibility, and ownership. Unlike legacy vendors that treat customer data as proprietary, the Hightouch-Narrative I/O model ensures enterprises fully control their identity data within their own Snowflake environments while unlocking advanced activation capabilities.
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“Whether we are talking about marketers or media networks, privacy legislation and signal loss are impacting the ability to activate at scale across channels and attribute disparate impressions to outcomes to validate investment,” said David Wells, Industry Principal, Advertising and Marketing Technology at Snowflake. “The future of owned and paid media is a federation of data and identity; consented linkages that are stitched together and packaged with an intuitive audience builder that allows optimal performance as well as ownership of one’s own graph.”
Key Capabilities of the Partnership
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Composable Identity Graphs with Multiple Vendors: Seamlessly combine first-party data with 30+ specialized providers—ranging from credit card tokens to demographic and global identity datasets—through cost-optimized enrichment.
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Full Ownership in Snowflake: Build, view, and manage identity graphs directly in your cloud environment, with transparency into match logic, data quality, freshness, and rates—free from vendor lock-in.
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Activation Across 250+ Channels: Push identity-enriched audiences into web, mobile, email, and paid media platforms using Hightouch’s intuitive audience builder and broad integration library.
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Automated Governance at Scale: Ensure compliance globally with built-in usage controls from Narrative, Snowflake’s native governance features, and Hightouch’s consent management.
“Our customers consistently asked for more control over their identity data and activation strategies,” said Kashish Gupta, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Hightouch. “Our Composable Identity partnership with Narrative and Snowflake answers that call-enterprises own their data, control their identity graph, and can activate audiences how they choose while maintaining strong governance over data use. It’s about giving power back to the customer.”