IP addresses were designed for network routing and device identification — not for the audience targeting, cross-session tracking, and campaign measurement the ad tech industry now asks them to power. The industry adopted IP as a signal because it's everywhere, not because it's durable.

That gap between what IP addresses were designed for and how the ad industry uses them shows up as “signal decay”: nearly 44% of IP addresses in the US move locations at least once within a 30-day period, and every campaign built on top of them inherits that instability. In practice, this means audience segments quietly drift to the wrong households, campaigns lose reach as addresses stop matching in the bid stream, and measurement can't connect exposures to outcomes once the underlying IP has moved.

This session introduces persistent signal infrastructure — a stable reference layer that keeps IP-based signals continuous even as the addresses underneath them rotate. We'll show how LocID, a fixed geospatial identifier developed by Digital Envoy, puts this into practice, anchoring rotating IPs to one stable signal so identity graphs, DSPs, and SSPs can keep relying on the IP-based data and audiences they already have, with greater confidence.