Ted Sfikas, Field CTO at Amplitude, came back to Deconstructing Data to talk about data ownership, why consumers will eventually control their own data, and why trust decides which first-party data strategies actually work.
Ted Sfikas recently ran a first-party data campaign through The Trade Desk with his marketing team. It worked great. The CPMs were also five to six times higher than what he’d pay on Google. And he thinks that’s exactly how it should be.
That’s a big deal. It tells you where the value in advertising is heading. Ted is Field CTO at Amplitude and a returning guest on Deconstructing Data. He started in engineering, spent years at Tealium learning digital marketing and adtech, and joined Amplitude in January 2024. Since his last visit a lot has changed, and Jessie Lisak and I had plenty to ask him.
What does it mean that data is a “digital currency”?
Ted’s first point was that data literacy starts with understanding the business. You have to be able to say which data you need, for which use case, and why. Some data comes from your own properties, and some comes from outside sources. How you treat each one shows how mature your data practice is.
He also thinks consumers share responsibility for this. It shouldn’t be left to brands alone.
“Data has become a digital currency now. And so I believe, I’m very passionate about this, that it shouldn’t be up to the business alone to determine your literacy as a consumer.”
— Ted Sfikas, Field CTO, Amplitude
Here’s the thing, though. Nobody reads the cookie banners. Ted had just come back from Greece and called it “banner fatigue.” Europe uses opt-in under GDPR. The US mostly uses opt-out under CCPA and the state laws that followed. My view is that most consumers don’t care much about where their data goes until there’s a breach. Then they get angry, join the class action, and get a check for a few dollars.
Ted made one interesting prediction here. Consent banners usually have four categories: strictly necessary, marketing, analytics, and personalization. He expects a fifth category specifically for AI. For now, AI processing falls under the behavioral or “decision-making” consent box.
Where are AI avatars and identity taking marketing?
Ted described an “avatar” as the persona each brand builds of you. It looks different to every company, and identity tokens are what increasingly connect it across the web.
“Identity management has really surfaced as the key ingredient to building that avatar.”
— Ted Sfikas, Field CTO, Amplitude
His example: when you’re watching Star Wars on Disney+, Nordstrom can show you an ad because Disney+ works with DSPs like The Trade Desk to pass an identity token. He expects measurement and validation to be the next big area of work.
He also sees money moving toward first-party data. Brands aren’t just sending all their budget to Google, Meta, and TikTok anymore. They’re building retail media networks and using data clean rooms to run joint campaigns with other brands. As he put it, businesses don’t keep investing in something unless it makes them money.
Ted thinks consumers will end up in control. He imagines a future without banners, where you set rules once on your phone or browser: a clothing brand gets everything it needs, a bank gets five fields. I’ve said this on the show before. When consumers choose what they share, the value of that ad space goes way up, because the ads are ones people actually want to see.
Why does the single customer view keep breaking?
To be ready for that future, brands need to be good data stewards. Ted pointed to three pieces. Event definitions are already fairly standard. Identity management is moving forward. The hard part is data drift.
“The single customer view is not just a buzzword. It’s a job. It’s a career. It’s a team of people.”
— Ted Sfikas, Field CTO, Amplitude
Back in the early CDP days, the plan was for the customer data platform to be the single source of truth. Then companies remembered they had already spent tens of millions on data warehouses and lakes. Ted thinks things are now moving toward the data clouds (Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure) and a composable approach, where tools like Amplitude run directly on the warehouse instead of storing and charging for the same data twice. That way no one is locked into a ten-year contract with a huge marketing suite.
Reach vs. precision: why first-party audiences cost more
This is where Ted and I agreed most. You can take an audience that performs well and move it to a different platform, and it falls apart. A lot of that, in my experience, comes from the identity graph. Many graphs we’ve tested are full of bots, click farms, and temporary or synthetic IDs from Apple and Google’s privacy features. One consumer can end up linked to hundreds of mobile IDs. You think you’re reaching 30 million people, but 20 million of those devices aren’t real.
Ted’s answer is authentication.
“With first party data, our reach is very low, right? We don’t have a lot of it yet because it’s only our own properties, but our precision is through the roof.”
— Ted Sfikas, Field CTO, Amplitude
The next step is modeling that first-party data to find new audiences, and this is where people get burned. Most platforms won’t tell you the precision of their lookalike models. If it’s 20% or 50%, what are you actually buying? At BDEX we build to an average of 85% precision or better, and that’s the number I’d tell anyone to ask about first.
Ted also expects media mix modeling to make a comeback. It works with aggregate signals, so it still helps while identity is incomplete. He gave a nod to Dr. Augustine Fou of FouAnalytics for calling out ad fraud in the industry.
How can marketers build trust with consumers?
Our last topic was trust. Ted sees it as a value exchange, and he thinks most brands get it wrong.
“You have to give me a reason to give you my data. If you just want to measure how many people came to your website and clicked on product ABC and abandoned their cart, I don’t really care.”
— Ted Sfikas, Field CTO, Amplitude
He compared the consent banner to someone walking into your store and saying hello. You’d say hello back. You wouldn’t hand them terms and conditions. He also mentioned the wave of lawsuits under the Video Privacy Protection Act over pixels that send viewing behavior to Facebook and TikTok without consent.
His advice for marketers: deliver real value, and don’t try to sell something every time. Nike and Adidas offer running apps that have nothing to do with buying shoes. People share their location because they get distance and progress tracking in return. Ted also told us about buying a Mini Cooper with no discount and a long shipping wait. He still loves the brand because of the community that comes with it.
“Start offering much more because data is worth a lot more.”
— Ted Sfikas, Field CTO, Amplitude
His current stack: Amplitude, Snowflake, AWS Bedrock, Braze, and The Trade Desk. He especially likes that The Trade Desk bought Sincera to score inventory quality for its customers.
The bigger picture
I keep coming back to Ted’s CPM story. Expensive impressions that convert beat cheap impressions that don’t, every time. That’s true in paid media and it’s true in organic marketing too. The real question is whether the data underneath is real.
Trust is going to decide who wins over the next few years. Consumers will trust brands that give them something back. Brands will trust data they can verify. And everyone will have to stop treating reach numbers full of fake devices as if they mean something. That’s the problem we work on every day at BDEX, and it was good to hear someone with Ted’s experience reach the same conclusion.
Connect with Ted: Find Ted Sfikas on LinkedIn (in his words, he’s the only Ted Sfikas in the world) and learn more about Amplitude at amplitude.com.
Work with BDEX: Want to reach real people instead of bots and temporary IDs? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert.”
Watch the episode: Data and AI Marketing: Empowering Ownership, Transparency, and Innovation
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
