Q&A with Roy Shkedi, Founder and CEO of Intent IQ

Roy Shkedi, founder and CEO of Intent IQ, has made a name for himself in our industry. If you’ve been anywhere near identity over the past decade, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of him. That’s not by accident.

Roy saw where the market was going before most people wanted to admit it. While the rest of us were still arguing about the death of the third-party cookie, he’d already filed the patents, built the infrastructure, and so on.

We also have to acknowledge the tech works. The numbers back it up. And the market is catching up to the very world Roy was preparing for years ago.

Which brings us to today’s conversation.

Recently, I talked to Roy to understand what he saw coming, what he built in response, and what he’s thinking about next.

We get into why cookie-based thinking is holding publishers back, how identity actually works in a mixed-consent world, and what performance means when half your audience is invisible. If you're responsible for results, the answers might already be here. You’ve just been looking in the wrong direction.

ROB: Most folks in this space know your name. But there’s a whole other part of the story that people don’t talk about. You didn’t just show up with a stack of patents. You built something. So give me the real origin story. How did Intent IQ actually start?

ROY: So, I founded AlmondNet back in 1998. That’s really where it all began. Intent IQ and some of our other companies grew out of that.

Before that, I was in Israeli military intelligence. I worked on R&D, and I was fortunate enough to receive one of the top honors in that field. After the army, I always knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur. But I’ve never believed in the whole “lightbulb moment” thing. I don’t think innovation happens like that.

The way I see it, you start with a real market problem. You ask: Can we solve it? Can we add real value? If the answer is yes (and not just incrementally, but meaningfully) then we build. Otherwise, we leave it. That’s been true from day one.

I looked at the ad tech space in the late ’90s, and it was so inefficient. That’s what pushed me to start.

Honestly, my wife made fun of me for a decade.

She said I was so far ahead of the market that I was afraid it would leave me behind. And she was right. I was cutting edge, maybe too early. You want to be on the edge, not the bleeding edge. But that’s how I operate.

Intent IQ officially launched in 2011, but the work started long before. We were developing cross-device and probabilistic identity tech in-house around 2007. At the time, I had to explain it multiple times. Even to our own CTO. People thought it was crazy. And now? Now I sit in meetings where someone pitches something as brand new, and I just sit there quietly. I’ve heard that pitch before. Because we built it back then.

The patents, some people focus on those, and I get that. I’ve filed more than 170. The patents are just the paper trail of real innovation. If you’re Google, you don’t need them. Your market power protects you. But for small and mid-sized companies like us? We are the collective sum of our innovation, which is reflected–and protected by our–patents.

Patents are how you protect the work.

Without them, your innovation just gets swallowed.

I always say the patent is a reflection of the team’s work, not the other way around.

And that same mindset is what still drives us now. We don’t build for what’s trending. For example, we see what’s broken in identity and so we innovate for where the industry is going, not just where it is today. We build for what’s coming. That’s why we’ve stayed relevant. That’s why the tech still works. And that’s why we keep going.

ROB: You’ve said before that the industry gets too distracted by whatever buzzword is trending. Alternative IDs, clean rooms, or whatever’s hot that month. But performance is what actually matters. So let’s talk about it. What does Intent IQ actually do that makes the numbers move? What’s working, and why?

ROY: The reality is, advertisers don’t lose sleep over cookies. CMOs aren’t sitting around worrying whether the signal is probabilistic or deterministic or if it comes from a clean room. They care about performance. That’s it. Can you help them reach the people they need to reach and prove it?

What Intent IQ does is solve that. We built what we call the IIQ ID, but we never positioned it like, “Here’s an alternative ID you should use.” We don’t expect buyers to change their entire system just to work with us. What we do is deliver results. That’s what they’re buying.

One example is we worked with a major education advertiser who was running only on cookies. We layered in our ID alongside that (cookies and cookieless together) and we increased the number of leads they got by 80%. Real leads. People filling out forms, asking to be contacted. And at the same time, we lowered their cost per lead by 80%.

The market still talks about third-party cookies like they’re going to disappear tomorrow. But the truth is, half the population (especially iPhone users) is already cookieless. And those users have 40% higher household income than the average Android user. So the question becomes this:

Can you afford to keep ignoring that half of the market?

Because most of the industry still is.

What we’ve done instead is create a system that lets you reach those users (whether the signal is there or not) by connecting IDs probabilistically and deterministically into environments like iOS or Safari. We see publishers making 3x more revenue on Android than iOS. Same user. Same visit. Just different signal loss. That’s the problem we solve.

And again, the point isn’t the ID itself. It’s the full system: mapping, activation, attribution. We built it end-to-end because no one else wanted to do the hard work. The other vendors just handed over the ID and said “Good luck.” We knew that wasn’t enough. It’s not about selling an ID. It’s about making sure the performance is there, start to finish.

ROB: A lot of what you’ve described is framed for the buy side. CMOs, performance marketers, big budgets. But I know you’ve said none of it works unless it works for publishers, too. So let’s talk about that. What should publishers be paying attention to right now, and how does Intent IQ actually move the needle for them?

ROY: You're right. Advertisers are the ones spending the money, so of course, they’re part of the conversation. But none of this works unless it also works for the publisher. That’s not a slogan either. That’s the reality we live in and we put ourselves at risk if we deny it.

Let’s take something simple. A user visits your site on both Android and iOS. Same person, same ad slot. But the Android impression earns you three times more revenue. Why? Because on Android, third-party cookies still work. On iOS, they don’t. That’s it. Same content, same audience, wildly different yield.

So publishers ask, “Why should I care about ID bridging or probabilistic identity?”

That’s why. You’re leaving money on the table every day you don’t solve for that gap. If we can help a publisher bridge those sessions (connect the user journey across environments) suddenly the iOS impression gets valued like the Android one. That’s real money.

But here’s the bigger point: any solution that only works for one side of the ecosystem will fail. If the advertiser sees performance but the publisher hardly making a living? That’s a broken model. If the publisher makes money but the advertiser sees garbage results? Same thing. It doesn’t last.

We’ve always built toward what I call a win-win-win. It has to work for the advertiser, the publisher, and the consumer. If one of those breaks, the whole thing falls apart. That’s why we didn’t just hand over an ID and walk away. We built the full stack to ensure it delivers for everyone.

And publishers (especially premium ones), they’re sitting on gold. They have real audiences, real attention, but they’re not always seeing the full value. What we do is help unlock that value, not by guessing, but by giving them the signal they’re missing. That’s what moves the needle.

ROB: You’ve been ahead of the market more than once and paid the price for being too early. So let me ask you this. What are you paying attention to now? What’s the next problem you think the industry hasn’t realized it needs to solve yet?

ROY: Yeah, I do have some things I’m working on, and I can’t talk about all of them yet. We have several patents in progress right now, and some of them deal with what I believe are the biggest challenges still ahead for this industry. But I’ll say this.

Whatever the technology is, the focus stays the same.

Performance, privacy, and making sure it works for everyone in the ecosystem.

That triangle of publisher, advertiser, and consumer is everything.

If we lose sight of one of those, the whole thing breaks. So any solution I’m thinking about, it has to serve all three. That’s the filter. It has to respect the consumer. It has to deliver performance to the buyer. And it has to unlock value for the publisher. Otherwise it’s just noise.

Now, one thing I think the market still underestimates is how hard real attribution is in a fragmented world. If you want to operate in both cookie and cookieless environments, and still measure what actually works. Most systems can’t handle that. They weren’t built for it. So that’s an area we’re continuing to invest in. Seamless attribution across all environments, with or without IDs.

And AI is interesting. There’s a lot of hype, of course, and a lot of hallucination (literally). But if we can use it responsibly, there’s real potential there, especially when it comes to optimization, fraud detection, and matching. That’s something I’m watching closely.

But again, everything we do starts with the same question: is this solving a real problem? If the answer is no, we don’t build it. If it is, and we can actually make it work, then we go.

ROB: Let me ask you about privacy. You’ve been thinking about user choice and consent long before it became fashionable or legislated. I know you even invented the AdChoices opt-out icon back in the day. Now, we’re watching companies like Google shape how consent works or doesn’t. What do you make of where privacy stands today, and who’s actually solving for it?

ROY: I’ve been thinking about privacy and consumer choice for a long time. Probably longer than most people in the industry. Back in 2004, I invented what became the AdChoices icon. You know, that little “i” in the corner of every banner ad? That was my idea. And at the time, people laughed at me. They said, “Roy, this is crazy. You’re making it too easy for users to opt out.” Even the chief privacy officer of what would later become a major Google subsidiary told me I was going too far.

But I believed then—and I still believe now—that if a user wants out, they should be able to opt out. They shouldn’t have to scroll to page 17 of a privacy policy to understand what’s happening. They should just click and know:

Who is targeting me?

Why are they targeting me?

What can I do about it?

That’s real transparency. That’s real choice.

Now, contrast that with what we’re seeing from Google. They pulled back on user-facing opt-out prompts (like the idea of a global “do not track” setting) because, in my opinion, they don’t want to open up a conversation about first-party vs. third-party cookies. Why? Because from a consumer’s point of view, there’s no difference. But from Google’s point of view, that’s the heart of their business model.

The problem is, we’ve turned privacy into a checkbox.

Something that can be passed by showing a banner or burying a link. And big platforms get to decide what counts as compliance. But that’s not helping users, and it’s not helping advertisers or publishers either.

Real privacy is when the user has control and understanding. That’s what we tried to build with AdChoices. And it’s what we still believe in today. Not because it’s trendy or required, but because it’s the only way the ecosystem holds together long-term.

Your Bottom Line

The future of identity isn’t going to be decided by press releases or panels. It’s going to be decided by whether the tech actually works when nobody’s watching.

Roy Shkedi didn’t wait for the industry to agree with him. He built what it needed, and then kept building when it moved the goalposts. You don’t have to like how he did it. But if you’re serious about performance, about making money in a world where half your audience is invisible, you should be paying attention to who’s actually solving for that.

The loudest people in ad tech are often the ones with nothing to lose. Roy has patents, products, and proof. And while most of the industry is still debating what comes after the cookie, he’s already quietly moving on to the next problem.

So here’s your move. Stop waiting for consensus. Start looking for results. Because that’s where this story has always been headed.

Editor’s Note:  Subsequent to the interview, Roku, Comcast, Samsung, and Oracle have taken patent licenses with Intent IQ.