It’s been one week since the highly anticipated Cannes Lions 2024—the event of the year for advertising and creativity. We are excited to present our top five takeaways from the event, revealing the industry’s priorities for the year ahead.
Navigating the post-cookie era
One of the pivotal discussions at Cannes Lions 2024 centered around signal loss and identity resolution. The industry is grappling with the impact of third-party cookie deprecation, driving a move toward alternative identifiers such as Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2) and ID5, and contextual targeting. This shift aims to uphold accurate audience targeting while addressing privacy concerns through authenticated forms of identity. Brands and agencies are actively exploring these new strategies to replace traditional cookie-based methods with stable, privacy-compliant solutions.
First-party data providers are also seeking data onboarding solutions to navigate this transition. They need streamlined integration processes, comprehensive ID-matching capabilities, and transparent pricing structures.
Fortified by our roots in offline data and significant investments in our Graph, and our newest offering, Third-Party Onboarding, you can count on Experian’s solutions to maintain strong signal coverage in a cookieless world so you can have uninterrupted, effective marketing.
Unifying targeting across TV platforms
Another focal point at Cannes Lions 2024 was the challenge of navigating TV fragmentation. Advertisers strive for unified targeting across diverse TV platforms, including connected TV (CTV) and traditional linear TV. They emphasize integrating data sources and ad servers to reach audiences across these platforms. CTV continues to stand out in conversations as a crucial and expanding area for advertising, offering new opportunities for targeted campaigns and broader audience engagement.
We’re fueling the expansion of CTV advertising through our signal-agnostic Graph, which seamlessly integrates CTV IDs, universal identifiers such as UID2, IP addresses, and mobile ad IDs (MAIDs) for targeted campaigns. Our newest offering, Third-Party Onboarding, also provides connectivity to more than 10 TV destinations.
Transforming marketing with AI
We would be remiss not to mention the hottest topic at Cannes Lions 2024, the transformative power of AI within data and identity. Discussions highlighted AI’s pivotal role in revolutionizing marketing strategies by enhancing campaign planning, dynamic optimization, measurement, and analytics. AI is not just a tool; it enables marketers to work smarter and faster. With real-time data enrichment, AI will empower marketers to manage large-scale campaigns with unprecedented efficiency and precision.
Marketers envision a future where AI seamlessly integrates into every aspect of their strategy, from understanding and predicting consumer behavior to automating personalized engagement. They see AI as the key to unlocking new levels of precision and efficiency, allowing them to adjust real-time campaigns based on consumer interactions and preferences. This vision includes using AI for deeper audience insights, ensuring that every marketing touchpoint is relevant and impactful.
Striving for strategies for proven ROI
Discussions on measurement at Cannes Lions 2024 focused on how measurement metrics are evolving to keep pace with industry changes. Cross-device, multi-touch attribution, and outcome-based metrics like consumer lifetime value and conversion rates are becoming more important. Accurate measurement is critical for demonstrating campaign impact and optimizing future marketing efforts.
These developments reflect a shift toward more sophisticated measurement practices to optimize marketing strategies and prove tangible ROI.
Through our Consumer Sync solutions, you can improve your attribution quality to understand the true path to conversion by linking all digital touchpoints to a single person.
Creating integrated consumer experiences with retail media networks
Retail media networks (RMNs) are becoming more integrated and connected. Their goal is to provide consumers with a unified online and physical store experience and create a comprehensive marketplace where retailers can work together and use shared data to better reach and engage with their audiences.
“Throughout the conversations, it’s been clear that there’s a lot of demand and interest in building and growing retail media networks. What strikes me is that Experian products, both across identity and data, can be a big support to help grow and fill in these gaps.”
budi tanzi, vp, product
Discussions at Cannes Lions 2024 emphasized how collaborations with technology providers and industry groups can help set measurement standards and ensure transparency. These partnerships can enable RMNs to expand their reach and compete with larger advertising platforms, driving industry growth and innovation.
Experian offers comprehensive solutions for RMNs. Our Profile Insights and Enrichment tools offer valuable customer behavior insights, driving smarter inventory management. We enhance ad targeting beyond item-level purchases with accurate data and syndicated audiences, aligning with broader media strategies. Third-Party Onboarding enables expansion beyond owned and operated inventory, supported by our Graph for enhanced connectivity.
“Data providers are excited to eliminate digital hops in their data flow using Experian Third-Party Onboarding. Third-Party Onboarding is uniquely set up to reduce friction for third-party data and the ecosystem in general.”
adam kobus, director of data partnerships
Experian events at Cannes Lions 2024
This year, we hosted a kick-off happy hour, content studio, and members of our team joined various panels across the Croisette. Here’s a recap of our week at Cannes.
Experian’s kick-off event with Audigent and LG Ad Solutions
To kick off the week, we co-hosted a happy hour with Audigent and LG Ad Solutions. At our sold-out event, attendees enjoyed a live performance from St. Lucia.
Content studio
We interviewed 27 thought leaders across the industry in our content studio. Our interviews covered topics like:
• Signal loss
• Connected and linear TV
• Data collaboration
• Future of addressability and personalization
• Retail media networks
• And more
We’ll be sharing more from our content studio over the coming months. Follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for our email newsletter for the latest updates.
Panel participation
The Experian team participated in four panels throughout the week across the Croisette:
- Scott Kozub, VP, Product Management, joined the Brand Innovators panel, “Future of media,” where he discussed how media companies can adapt their content and distribution strategies to cater to changing consumption habits as media becomes more fragmented across devices and platforms.
- Kimberly Gilberti, Chief Product Officer, joined OpenX’s panel, “Unlocking addressability: Navigating the post-cookie era,” to discuss the prevailing strategies for achieving addressability in a cookieless world.
- Budi Tanzi, VP, Product, participated in Audigent’s panel, “Curation in regulated industries,” where they talked about why curation is effective in regulated markets like finance and health.
- Rachael Donnelly, Chief Marketing Officer, joined The Female Quotient in the Equality Lounge for their panel “Emotional agility: Leading beyond the double standard,” where they explored the power of diverse storytelling and its impact on audience engagement, brand building, and the bottom line.
Let’s keep the momentum going
As we wrap up another exciting week at Cannes Lions, the discussions have shown us the potential for innovation in signal loss, TV fragmentation, AI, measurement, and retail media networks. These topics pave the way for a more connected future in advertising. Which trends are you most excited about? Let’s continue the conversation! Reach out to us, and let’s dive deeper into these topics together.
We understand that customers may be experiencing uncertainty with their marketing strategies with Oracle’s exit from advertising. Experian is one of Oracle’s primary data providers powering their audiences. We can help marketers easily make the switch from Oracle audiences to Experian audiences without changes in advertising effectiveness or efficiency.
We have mapped Oracle audiences to Experian audiences to make it easy for you to switch your campaign targeting to Experian. Reach out to your account representative or our audiences team for information about audience mapping and finding the most relevant Experian audience for your campaigns.
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Privacy-forward pharma media supports more informed healthcare journeys Effective pharma marketing depends on reaching patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals (HCPs) with useful information in appropriate, privacy-forward ways. The goal is to make relevant education easier to find, support more informed conversations, and help brands understand how media contributes across the health journey. In this Ask the Expert session, Natalie Mancuso, SVP, Data Partnerships at DeepIntent, joins Sheila Wirick, who leads the health team at Experian, to discuss how to craft patient and HCP campaigns, privacy-safe activation workflows, connected TV (CTV), and measurement approaches built for pharma. Why should your media plan start with understanding the patient and provider The patient-and-provider journey should inform your media plan, as treatment decisions in pharma are increasingly informed, personal, and patient-driven. With more health information available than ever, patients are playing a more active role in understanding their options and participating in treatment conversations. As other industries become more customer-centric, pharma media planning needs to become more patient-centric. “We’ve got patients who are more informed, more involved in their treatment decisions than ever. The accessibility of data and information and the ways we can consume it with just AI alone is so vast that if we’re not arming people with the right information in real time, we’re missing the boat.”Natalie Mancuso, SVP, Data Partnerships This means media should be aligned to where a patient or provider is in the decision journey and what they need at that moment. Early on, media may play an educational role by building awareness of a condition, symptom, or treatment category. Later, it may help support more specific questions, treatment consideration, access, affordability, or adherence. The patient-provider conversation remains the key boundary. That exchange should stay private and clinically led. Media can play a valuable role before and after those moments by offering information that helps patients and providers feel more informed. How can brands connect patient and HCP messaging responsibly? It’s critical for agencies and brands to deliver relevant messaging to inform each stakeholder’s needs throughout the treatment journey, especially ahead of key clinical milestones. To execute this, brands must exercise privacy-forward activation, keeping patient and HCP identity, activation, and measurement paths separate, while using a common workflow layer to support the same brand goal. Experian helps pharma marketers do this by acting as an independent, privacy-forward identity, data, and workflow layer. We bring together high-fidelity matching, governed onboarding, and non-clinical consumer context, so patient and HCP engagement can be activated more accurately across channels and connected to reporting. The distinction is not only where each audience is reached. HCPs may be engaged in both professional and personal environments, but their needs are different from patients’. For example, an HCP may receive messaging about co-pay savings for eligible patients, while a patient may receive information about patient support programs. These are different messages for different audiences, but they ladder up to the same goal: informing both parties in a privacy-forward, relevant way. Hear from Natalie Mancuso in our 2026 State of advertising report In our 2026 State of advertising report, Natalie shares why identity serves as the connective infrastructure that links planning, activation, and measurement across connected TV (CTV), programmatic, commerce media, and walled garden environments. Download the report Watch Natalie’s Q&A What does privacy-forward activation look like in pharma? Pharma brands often start with fragmented patient and HCP signals. Privacy-forward activation turns those inputs into usable audiences by first confirming that the data can be used, then translating identity in controlled environments that protect personally identifiable information through tokenization or other methodologies. For DTC, that means building and matching audiences without relying on inferred health conditions from browsing behavior. For HCPs, it means connecting professional identity to verified sources in a way that supports activation and measurement. In a category shaped by HIPAA, state privacy laws, internal review, and consumer sensitivity, building privacy in from sourcing through activation is what makes responsible health media possible. How can CTV play a more useful role in pharma? CTV can play a more useful role in healthcare when it’s connected to a larger, privacy-forward plan and not treated as just an awareness channel. DeepIntent connects CTV and digital exposure data using identity signals, such as National Provider Identifiers (NPIs), hashed email addresses, IP addresses, device IDs, and household signals, where permitted and reviewed. That identity layer helps support sequencing and suppression across streaming, endemic, mobile, and digital settings. In practice, CTV can introduce targeted education or broad brand awareness, and later touchpoints can provide sequential information in the right channels. Instead of repeating the same message, brands can make pivots based on engagement and context. “For us, it starts with identity and not panels. When we’re resolving CTV and digital exposures to the same person, we’re leveraging signals so that every touchpoint across streaming, endemic, and mobile is recognized as the same individual, not model lookalikes.”Natalie Mancuso, SVP, Data Partnerships For pharma, campaign performance should not be measured by reach alone. A stronger approach looks at whether sequenced engagement contributes to meaningful downstream signals, including: Prescription activity Provider engagement Referral patterns Patient compliance Adherence signals, where measurement is permitted Why should messaging and reporting change in pharma? Pharma campaigns are journeys with changing information needs. Reporting should guide the campaign optimization. “If I’m launching into a market with a new class of drug, I’m asking what education needs to be put into the market – from both an HCP and a consumer standpoint – to build awareness?”Natalie Mancuso, SVP, Data Partnerships Clicks and website visits still have a place, but they can’t tell the full pharma story. DeepIntent processes data in real time, giving brands an up-to-date read on how media connects to campaign engagement. Campaign signals can help teams optimize audience logic, creative, channel mix, or sequencing during a live campaign. Heading Test for Media & Text Block Content Test for Media &Text Block Learn more Heading Test for Media & Text Block Content Test for Media &Text Block Learn more Heading Test for Media & Text Block Content Test for Media &Text Block Learn more Explore how privacy-safe pharma activation can make an impact Experian brings marketing data and identity expertise for health marketing and DeepIntent adds pharma-specific activation experience. Together, we help brands connect patient and HCP strategies responsibly, with privacy built in from the start. Watch the full video with our experts to hear Sheila Wirick and Natalie Mancuso discuss patient and HCP messaging, CTV, privacy-safe activation, and outcome measurement for pharma brands. About our experts Natalie Mancuso SVP, Data Partnerships, DeepIntent Natalie Mancuso is SVP, Data Partnerships at DeepIntent and a leader in health-focused AdTech and DSP strategy. With over 20 years of experience growing billion-dollar healthcare brands, she turns complex data into scalable, performance-driven solutions that keep marketers ahead of industry change. Sheila Wirick Director of Health Sales, Experian Sheila Wirick is the Director of Health Sales at Experian with more than 20 years of experience in data and analytics. As Director of Health Sales at Experian Marketing Services, she collaborates with healthcare, pharmaceutical, and nonprofit organizations to apply data and insights that enhance customer retention, brand awareness, and acquisition. She is committed to helping organizations use data to deliver measurable results and meaningful impact. FAQs What makes a pharma audience activation-ready? A pharma audience is activation-ready when patient or HCP inputs can be translated into usable audiences with the right accuracy, controls, interoperability, and destination readiness. For patient engagement, that may include privacy-safe cohort construction, caregiver logic, non-clinical enrichment and appropriate exclusion rules. For HCP engagement, it may include governed identity inputs such as NPI, specialty, practice location, professional address and other verified attributes where appropriate. How can pharma brands sequence messages across channels responsibly? Pharma brands can sequence messages responsibly by giving each channel a clear role and using audience logic to maintain continuity. CTV and out-of-home can support awareness, social can reinforce the message, search can capture active research and point-of-care or rep-triggered channels can support decision moments. The workflow should preserve separation between patient and HCP identity strategies. What should pharma marketers measure beyond clicks and site visits? Pharma marketers should measure whether media connects to outcomes such as audience quality, prescription activity, qualified HCP engagement, verified delivery, referral patterns, therapy starts or adherence signals where permitted. These outcomes often depend on partner-enabled workflows, clean rooms, and aggregated outputs rather than direct end-to-end tracking. How does Experian help pharma brands connect identity, activation and measurement? Experian acts as an independent privacy-first identity, data, and workflow layer for pharma marketers. We help brands bring together identity, high-fidelity matching, governed onboarding, non-clinical consumer context, and partner interoperability so patient and HCP engagement can be activated more accurately across channels and connected more cleanly to partner-enabled measurement. Latest posts
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Use case #1: Identifying customer spending potential to boost growth for a retail chain Objective Solution Results The solution By syncing its cookies with the Digital Graph, the DSP gained access to related identifiers, including: This expanded identity universe gave the DSP a unified view of individuals and households, making it possible to connect impressions to conversions across devices and channels. With each weekly refresh, attribution models stayed accurate and up to date, turning fragmented signals into proof of performance. Results Within weeks, the DSP saw measurable improvements