Carter, welcome to MarTech Cube! We’re excited to hear your insights on SheerID’s latest innovations and the evolving landscape of audience data.
Can you share your career journey and what led you to your role as Chief Product Officer at SheerID?
My career has always been centered around product, data, and technology while leading teams at companies such as Verizon, Experian, EdgeCast, and Cheetah Digital. At each stop, I’ve been drawn to the challenge of building products that actually move the needle. By this, I mean tools that drive measurable ROI and build authentic, trust-based relationships between brands and their customers.
That’s what ultimately brought me to SheerID. The company’s mission is to help brands connect with high-value audiences in a privacy-first, identity-driven way, and that felt like a natural evolution of my career up until now. And with AI transforming how we reach and engage people, it felt like the right time to double down on truth-based, permissioned data.
We work with house-name customers like Peacock, which leveraged SheerID to target students, teachers, and military members and saw a 70% conversion rate across key segments. Another great example is our work with Perplexity, one of the more exciting names in the AI space, which is leveraging our platform to grow its student and researcher base by offering up to two years free of Perplexity Pro.
With our Audience Data Platform, we’re providing marketers with a new way to reach these audiences at scale while still protecting their privacy. It’s not just about media efficiency; it’s about building lasting loyalty with the people who matter most. I’m proud of the team we’ve built, the work we’re doing with partners across the media and AI ecosystem, and where we’re headed next.
SheerID recently launched the industry’s first Audience Data Platform (ADP). What gap in the market does this platform address, and how does it transform the way brands engage with high-value audiences?
Brands have historically depended on third-party data and tracking methods that are becoming increasingly restricted by regulation and consumer sentiment. New laws, such as GDPR and CCPA, along with shifting browser policies, have rendered traditional targeting methods ineffective. As a result, marketers face an uphill battle to earn trust, personalize experiences, and drive results.
SheerID offers an alternative: a platform based on consent and transparency. By verifying and enriching data that consumers willingly share, SheerID provides brands with reliable tools to reach targeted audiences, including students, educators, first responders, healthcare workers, and military personnel. The data is verified through over 200,000 authoritative sources, enabling accurate and secure audience targeting.
Identity verification is critical because it ensures marketers engage with real, eligible individuals, which prevents fraud, protects margins, and builds trust. Our customer audits have shown that discount abuse can be as high as 35%. That erodes brand profits and damages the exclusivity of brands’ discounts, making them less appealing to customers. This can even hurt a brand when students, for example, see that their “exclusive offer” is available to everyone.
Our approach transforms how brands engage with high-value audiences,
limiting the risks tied to anonymous tracking and offer abuse. As a result, marketers can instead focus on building lasting, trusted relationships. With tighter budgets and increasing pressure on ROI, this type of verified data strategy is more effective and sustainable. Applying SheerID’s technology and verified data, brands can give back to audiences that serve and support local communities.
How does SheerID’s ADP enhance a brand’s database, and what are the key advantages of integrating consent-based data into marketing strategies?
SheerID’s Audience Data Platform (ADP) verifies and appends rich, permissioned data that can be activated across more than 400 martech and adtech platforms used by brands.
Brands leveraging this data in their marketing strategies engage real people, with their consent, resulting in greater accuracy and trust. This approach to data collection is privacy-compliant, supporting GDPR and CCPA regulations. Using SheerID’s ADP, brands can deliver hyper-personalized experiences that drive higher conversion and loyalty.
This strategy enables brands to establish long-term customer relationships founded on transparency and mutual value. The result is a more efficient, secure, and future-ready approach to audience engagement.
Many brands struggle with balancing personalization and scalability. How does SheerID’s ADP help marketers achieve both effectively?
Our Audience Data Platform (ADP) combines real-time customer verification with enriched, consent-based data, enabling brands to confidently personalize offers and messaging based on truth, not assumptions, about the user.
ADP scales these capabilities seamlessly by integrating verified data across the hundreds of martech and adtech platforms mentioned above. This allows brands to activate personalized campaigns at speed and scale without compromising privacy or accuracy. The result? Precise, privacy-first personalization that drives sustainable growth at scale.
Which industries stand to benefit the most from SheerID’s ADP, and do you see any emerging use cases that might surprise marketers?
Industries that rely on identity-based offers, such as AI, retail, travel, software, and consumer services, benefit most from SheerID’s ADP. These sectors often target high-value audiences (e.g., students, educators, military personnel) and need a trusted way to verify eligibility and personalize engagement at scale. Our arrangement with Perplexity as described above, is an excellent example of how we’re working with AI companies.
Note that 86% of students use AI for studying, 61% of educators use it for teaching, and even 55% of our military personnel use AI for education and training. There’s a significant opportunity for AI companies to capture market share by leveraging the power of exclusive audience offers to turn users into lifelong advocates.
Recently, we announced a partnership with Albertsons, the major food and drug retailer, to verify SNAP benefit recipients to help combat food insecurity. It’s relationships like this that make us proud.
Emerging use cases are also gaining traction—especially in loyalty, co-marketing, and audience enrichment. For example, brands are using ADP to link loyalty programs with partners, unlock new acquisition channels through the Affinity Network, and activate verified communities across digital media. These innovative applications are expanding what’s possible in audience engagement and surprising marketers with efficiency, reach, and ROI.
In an era where data privacy is a major concern, how does SheerID ensure transparency and consumer trust while enabling brands to leverage verified data?
The marketing and advertising industries have undergone significant transformation due to the threat of cookie deprecation, loss of other signals, and privacy legislation. SheerID saw these changes early on and adjusted product and market strategies accordingly.
In our new privacy-centric reality, brands struggle to collect, verify, and activate consumer data at scale. SheerID’s technology verifies interactions with each consumer using permissioned data, which is information the consumer knowingly and willingly shares in a value exchange, such as exclusive offers.
All data is verified in real time using our 200,000+ authoritative sources and never scraped or inferred. Brands gain accurate, actionable insights, while consumers enjoy a secure and transparent experience that respects their privacy. This trust-first approach meets global privacy compliance standards and builds lasting loyalty.
What role does AI or machine learning play in SheerID’s ADP, and how do you see technology evolving in the audience data space?
AI is a critical and ever-expanding part of the SheerID technology stack. Most importantly, ADP’s Offer Protection engine secures the offers of our brands against the constantly evolving fraud attempts from around the world. From SSO vulnerability detection to image manipulation detection in official documents to hundreds of billions of threat signals in our graph. SheerID’s ADP is well-equipped to keep our high-value verified audiences secure.
AI’s role will be expanding in the ADP to help with data enrichment through probabilistic matches. Verification of data involves a tradeoff of expense for security. We’re working to reduce the expense of friction and cost without creating costs for security. This approach involves intelligent consumer data analysis and automatic audience segmentation powered by AI and machine learning models.
As a product leader, how do you approach innovation and product development to stay ahead in the fast-changing MarTech landscape?
Our innovation strategy centers around two core approaches: co-creating with our customers and making data-driven decisions.
First, we co-create with our customers. This means more than just gathering feedback; it’s about forming genuine partnerships with the marketers and loyalty leaders we serve. We regularly elevate the voice of the customer by synthesizing insights from surveys, social listening, and support interactions. This input directly informs our product priorities and design choices. We’ve seen that when customers feel heard and invested, we build better tools—and stronger relationships.
Second, we rely on data-driven decision-making. Throughout the product lifecycle, from initial concept to launch and iteration, we utilize performance metrics, trend analyses, and behavioral data to inform our roadmap. Our focus is always on impact: which capabilities will drive the most meaningful outcomes, such as increasing the volume and value of new-to-file customers or improving conversion rates. This often translates to investing in smarter real-time decisioning and low-latency data systems that help brands act quickly and effectively.
Together, these two approaches ensure we’re not just building for the market but also staying ahead of it.
What advice would you give to marketers looking to build authentic, long-term relationships with high-value audiences?
Earn your relationships by earning the trust of consumers. Be as transparent as possible about your processes and how data is sourced and used. Always ensure proper use of that data. Never stop examining your data in different ways. Every brand is an authoritative source of data. They are the ones who know their customers’ preferences and behavior best.
Always ensure a solid sense of identity at the center by securing or matching data against a permissioned and authoritative source. This strategy helps build a robust profile of each consumer, combining solid sources that are observed, derived, or probabilistic based on behavior. From this hybrid approach, brands will be able to build a deeper understanding of their consumers.
Looking ahead, how do you envision the future of audience data and its role in shaping the next generation of marketing strategies?
As fraud continues to increase and become more sophisticated, through deepfakes, AI-generated phishing emails, synthetic identity, Multi-Factor Authentication bypass, and more, so will the methods of establishing identity. Consumers will have more control and consent over what data they share and with whom. Marketers must rely heavily on identity providers and authoritative sources to ensure data security and integrity. These profiles will likely become more open and portable as some of the walled gardens are broken down by regulatory efforts.
The customer journey will also evolve. Traditionally, it is a single brand and driven by marketing construct automation. A real customer journey, such as a business or personal trip or the remodeling of a home, develops across brands through products, services, and content. Brands will need to discover the data that best models this journey to build partnerships that will engage consumers where they are. Open portable identities and verified consumer data will be indispensable in powering that type of experience.
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