We walked into Ramp Up with our finger on the pulse. We knew privacy was top-of-mind for folks and that teams were increasingly exploring building rather than buying identity graphs.
But across conversations in meeting rooms, coffee shops, and rooftop bars, a few themes kept surfacing regardless of who we were talking to. Some confirmed what we'd been seeing build for months. Others gave us useful texture on how fast things are moving.
With a few days to chew on it, here is what stood out most at Ramp Up
Privacy Still Matters. And Most People Are Behind on It.
Privacy anchored a lot of our conversations. What became clear quickly was that being genuinely informed about the regulatory landscape is rarer than it should be. More than once, a product leader stopped us mid-conversation to say some version of "how do I not know more about this." We heard that enough times that it stopped being surprising.
That's the gap Unacast has been building toward closing. We have a dedicated team whose job is to track regulatory developments, anticipate what's coming, and make sure our partners don't get caught flat-footed when a new law takes effect. Oregon and Maryland laws are live and other states are just behind. Having that context ready, and being able to walk a customer through what it means for their specific use case, is a different kind of value than just handing over a compliance checklist.
It's also worth being direct about what these laws actually require. Oregon's HB 2008 bans the sale of precise geolocation data, which includes bundling, licensing, and derivative products. Maryland's MODPA goes further still: You have to demonstrate documented business necessity for processing the data at all. These are substantive structural changes to how location data can flow through a supply chain, and they affect every partner in it.
Unacast has built privacy-enhancing technology into the infrastructure itself: filtering signals from sensitive locations, sourcing exclusively from opted-in devices, and applying those standards globally rather than only where the law currently requires it. It's a product philosophy as much as it's a compliance response. And based on the conversations we had at Ramp Up, it's one that more buyers are starting to ask.
The Dominant Trend?: Vendor Consolidation
If we had to pick one theme that ran through almost every meeting, it was that companies are consolidating their data supplier relationships, and they're doing it fast.
We talked to buyers running anywhere from three to six data vendors with overlapping offers. The math is simple enough: fewer contracts, fewer compliance reviews, fewer methodology conversations, fewer procurement cycles, and likely, better partnerships. One conversation with an enterprise ad tech company summed it up cleanly: if one partner can cover multiple layers of what they need, they'd rather grow that relationship than go through onboarding a new vendor five times.
What's interesting is why this is happening now. Sure, it’s cost-cutting, but it's also that buyers are waking up to the fact that they've been receiving duplicative data across multiple feeds, and paying for the overlap (and for storing that overlap). When you start asking which supplier actually delivers the most usable signal at scale, the redundancy becomes hard to justify.
This is a moment that plays directly to how Unacast is built. We’re not a data broker, really. We deliver location intelligence with built-in device analytics, data linkages, and enrichment under one roof. For a team trying to reduce vendors without sacrificing capability, that's a meaningful difference, and it's one we'll make clearer going forward.
Fewer Vendors = Building rather than Buying
As expected, in-housing identity data came up plenty in our conversation, especially on the back of the vendor consolidation efforts. Rather than buying the finished product, teams are looking to carefully buy themselves to enhance their own platform, working directly with hashed emails, CTV IDs, and other key identifiers. The main appeal is to have more control over the freshness and composition of audiences, and ensure cross-channel activation is fresh.
What the conversations at Ramp Up made clear, though, is that in-housing creates a new set of problems even as it solves old ones. When you bring identity resolution in-house, you inherit the data quality burden that comes with it. Every MAID in your graph needs to represent a real person with real behavioral patterns. Every linkage needs to hold up under scrutiny. The moment you start building on unverified signals, you're going to have campaigns that miss the mark.
All of Unacast’s central offerings are built on processing and curating raw location data. But turning data into location intelligence means working with other selectors as well; so whether it’s IP addresses or hashed emails, teams leverage Unacast to simplify their in-housing efforts because we can handle both the SDK verification and supply other key selectors to add even more intelligence to the mobile ID.
But this segways into the last big conversation topic….
Device Quality: The Thing Everyone Was Asking About
It’s a well known fact. Raw location data can be a bit unreliable…but sometimes product and data teams misunderstand what precision and accuracy mean. It’s easy to forget about synthetic signals and just assume that every device ping is accurate down to the millimeter.
Zooming out for a moment: SDK-derived mobile location data (at least any reliable source) requires a consumer’s consent, which means you need to allow precise location services to be used on your phone with any given app. A lot of apps don’t require the level of precision. It needs to know within a few hundred years, or a kilometer, or a few kilometers… So while it’s not uncommon for a company to go hunting for all precise, down to the millimeter location signals, they will in fact find that it doesn’t in what’s commercially available, at least not at the scale they assumed.
That’s why fusing smarter location intelligence, with all of the analytical layers Unacast’s provides, with other data sources is more important than ever. Certainly, they need trustworthy and scalable selectors to attach to the Mobile ID, but the extra insight into the signal itself becomes that much more essential.
Unacast builds analytics into every signal we collect (60-70 billion per day). The analytics help teams have more context and information about the signal, essentially allowing them to prioritize the signals that matter most to them. For instance, any given OOH campaign may want to prioritize or possibly remove signals from people who are driving. Well, Unacast flags signals as likely driving or not to help teams quickly device which signals matter most of a given campaign or use case. All told, Unacast has 24 flags giving different kinds of insight and context into the signals, ranging from understand if a signal is driving, IP derived, or synthetic in some way.
So, teams want to bring it all in-house. They want more focused, precise signals, and they want processing before the data is dropped on their lap. The message from buyers was consistent: if you can help us flush out bad supply faster and with less manual work, that's worth paying for. (Hint: that’s literally why Unacast exists).
What We're Taking Into the Rest of 2026
A few things became clearer coming out of Ramp Up. Privacy is matters, but we gotta shout it from the rooftops to educate the whole market (not just our customers). Vendor consolidation is a forcing function that rewards suppliers who can do more under one roof. In-housing identity infrastructure is speeding up the need for data
The thread running through all of it is the same one we've been building toward: more data isn't the answer anymore. Smarter data is. Data that arrives with context, with built-in analytics, with privacy compliance already handled: that's what teams actually need when they're taking on more of the data infrastructure burden themselves.
We're glad Ramp Up confirmed it. We're even more glad we've spent years building for exactly that.
Want to talk through what any of this means for your specific use case? Start a conversation here.
