The idea
Marketing spent decades targeting identity. Age, title, company size, industry, location. The premise was that who someone is predicts what they will buy. It was always a weak proxy, and it is getting weaker. The better predictor has always been behaviour: what a person is actively doing, researching, comparing, and signalling right now. The reason identity won anyway was that intent was hard to observe at scale. That constraint is lifting.
Why it holds
A buyer’s demographic profile is stable and mostly irrelevant on any given day. Their intent is volatile and almost entirely relevant. Two people with identical titles at identical companies are not equally likely to buy. The one researching the problem this week is. As intent signals become cheaper to detect and easier to act on, spending against identity looks increasingly like spending against an average that describes no actual buyer. The teams that win are the ones that detect intent early, while it is still a faint signal, and act before it becomes obvious demand that everyone is already bidding on.
What it means in practice
Stop building audiences and start detecting signals. Ask what someone is doing that reveals a problem worth solving, then meet them there with something useful rather than something promotional. Demographic targeting tells you who to interrupt. Intent tells you who to help. The first is a tax you pay for not knowing better. The second compounds, because helping someone at the moment of intent is how trust gets built and how the next purchase gets pre-decided. Identity is a description. Intent is a decision in progress.