Every year, the Experian team attends the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to study the latest technological advancements and innovations that shape the AdTech industry. The energy at CES 2025 was palpable, with a whirlwind of conversations around artificial intelligence (AI), connected TV (CTV), privacy-first solutions, and sustainability in advertising. Here are four standout themes from this year’s event.
1. The AI evolution: More buzzwords, but growing potential
AI dominated discussions this year, but the gap between hype and practical application was still evident. While some vendors showcased innovative tools for campaign optimization and audience creation, much of the buzz felt aspirational.
The use of AI to generate audiences based on new types of data is a promising sign of things to come. Data providers, including those collaborating with Experian, are beginning to test AI tools to enhance audience accuracy and scale. The AI space still feels frenetic, but the potential for transformative change is undeniable.
“AI was a hot topic, with discussions ranging from campaign optimization tools to audience selection. While many leaned on buzzwords, there were glimpses of legitimate use cases.”
Brooke Logan, VP of Data Strategy and Partnerships
2. CTV: A race for quality and curation
CTV remained a popular topic at CES, particularly around the challenges of fragmentation and scale. Sellers are grappling with an oversupply of inventory, leading to a renewed focus on curation. Conversations highlighted the importance of premium audiences, brand safety, and identity resolution. In the fragmented CTV landscape, advertisers want to be able to define an audience once, have that audience be highly addressable, and then activate everywhere.
One standout theme was the shift in CTV monetization strategies. With linear TV revenues declining, major publishers are exploring ways to maximize yields on streaming platforms. Direct-sold premium inventory still reigns, but programmatic is gaining traction—a trend we’re seeing driven by publishers seeking scalable solutions.
“CTV remains fragmented. While premium inventory is largely direct-sold, big publishers are exploring ways to boost yield on streaming as linear revenue declines.”
Lauren Portell, Sr. Account Executive, Advanced TV
3. Privacy-first solutions
The regulatory landscape continues to evolve, and advertisers are responding with innovative, privacy-centric methodologies. For industries like healthcare, privacy-first solutions are being developed from the ground up to comply with current and future regulations. The emphasis on cookieless and contextual advertising remains strong, with data providers utilizing first-party data to enrich audience targeting strategies.
“Providers across verticals that are typically more sensitive are developing methodologies from the ground up based on current and future potential privacy regulations.”
Adam Kobus, Director of Data Partnerships
4. Eco-conscious advertising: Building a sustainable future
Sustainability emerged as a growing focus, as indicated by initiatives like Scope3 and Experian’s own carbon reduction goals. Companies are exploring ways to reduce the environmental impact of ad serving and data management. For example, platforms like AdGood are transforming unused CTV inventory into opportunities for non-profit initiatives. While not strictly eco-focused, these efforts signal a shift toward more conscientious advertising practices.
“Sustainability is gaining attention, with efforts to reduce the carbon footprint through eco-conscious advertising, data management practices, and ad serving.”
Erin Wolf, Sr. Account Executive, Demand Partnerships
The buzz around Experian
The launch of the Experian marketplace and the Audigent acquisition were major talking points, underscoring Experian’s commitment to innovation in AdTech. Together, Experian and Audigent will be an end-to-end solution where publishers big and small can empower marketers to better understand their customers, create precise audience segments, and activate those audiences across the best inventory.
Likewise, Experian’s new data marketplace connects TV operators, programmers, supply partners, and demand platforms with top-tier third-party audiences across retail, CPG, health, B2B, and location intelligence. All audiences delivered from our marketplace benefit from our best-in-class offline and digital identity graphs, which ensure addressability across all channels like display, mobile, and CTV.
An exciting year ahead
CES 2025 underscored the rapid evolution of the advertising ecosystem. From AI to CTV and privacy-first solutions, the industry is adapting to new challenges and opportunities. As Experian continues to lean into these trends, our role in powering data-driven advertising through connectivity remains more focused than ever.
We’re excited to see how these themes will evolve throughout the year and look forward to collaborating with our partners to shape the future of digital advertising. Follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for our email newsletter for more informative content on the latest industry insights and data-driven marketing.
Latest posts
The Tapad Graph Now Offered in Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud New York, NY — August 7, 2018 — Tapad, now part of Experian, is advancing personalization for the modern marketer, announced today that its proprietary Tapad Graph is now integrated with Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, helping marketers expand their view of consumers and boost results through Tapad’s probabilistic solution. Tapad has been working closely with the Adobe Audience Manager team on this integration. With the Tapad Graph integration, customers based in the U.S. and Canada can use the Tapad Device Graph to expand the reach of audiences defined and activated in Adobe Audience Manager to extend first- and third-party data and deliver personalization across paid, earned and owned channels, publisher sites, programmatic, and more. Tapad worked closely with Adobe to develop the integration, allowing marketers to enable first-party data that has been previously tied to cookies and mobile. This offering has been beta-tested by leading organizations across retail, financial services, telecom providers, and more. “We're excited to publicly announce the solution our team has been closely designing over the past 12 months with Adobe,” said Chris Feo, SVP, Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. “This solution will give marketers in the U.S. and Canada the ability to unlock increased value from Adobe Audience Manager through the power of the Tapad Graph and its ability to expand customer prospects.” Tapad has repeatedly proven its ability to provide marketers with a unified view of the customer across channels and screens. With the Tapad Graph, a global identity graph that currently supports more than 100 enterprise customers and 200 integration partners, marketers can extend their reach and customize messages based on user and household-level data. Contact us today
Marketers Can Now Harness The Tapad Graph In Concert With Twine’s Vetted, Verified TrueData™ Identity Graph. Los Angeles and New York – August 2, 2018 – Tapad, now part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer, today announced that it is partnering with mobile data leader Twine Data to bring Twine’s hundreds of millions of deterministic mobile identity connections to The Tapad Graph. Together, the two companies will create one of the largest portable identity graph & CRM onboarding services in the U.S., through the integration of Tapad’s best in class cross-device capability and Twine’s deterministic identity graph. "Twine is a respected player in the onboarding space", said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "Through Tapad and Twine’s partnership, our clients can now use their first-party CRM data to leverage the full power of The Tapad Graph — fueling a wide range of data-driven marketing use cases, including audience extension, attribution, and personalization." At the core of one-to-one marketing and true personalization is identity resolution. For marketers, the ability to accurately and safely connect customer activity across desktop/laptop, mobile, CTV, tablets, as well as CRM and offline touchpoints is ultimately what enables informed and personalized future conversations with each customer. Tapad is known for the precision, accuracy, and scale of their cross device connections, setting them up as an ideal partner for Twine’s TrueData deterministic identity graph. “We believe that by combining Tapad’s renowned cross-device connectivity and our deterministic identity graph, marketers will finally be able to seamlessly segment users based on digital and offline behaviors as well as easily distribute those audiences to both DMP and DSP environments for personalized messaging,” said Elliott Easterling, CEO of Twine Data. With this partnership, Tapad will build a client's cross-device graph off of identities onboarded by Twine from a client's offline CRM. The resulting identity graph can either be delivered directly to brands looking to host their own identity graph, or can be leveraged in a managed fashion for marketers looking for simple connectivity of their offline CRM audiences to their DSPs. To date, Twine & Tapad have seen full connectivity rates* for CRM segments from advertisers at between 259 percent and 322 percent at major DSPs. *Full Connectivity Rate is defined as {total unique desktop, laptop, and mobile devices active at DSP} / {unique CRM users in original audience post cleansing}. It represents the final match rate of the clean audience in CRM format to onboarded audience at a client’s DSP instance. This metric encompasses Twine’s onboarding & linkage validation and Tapad’s cross-device amplification. Contact us today About TapadTapad, Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company's signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world's largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first-, second- and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad's numerous awards include: Forbes' Most Promising Companies, Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, Crain's Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award's "Startup Founder of the Year." Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world's largest mobile operators across Scandinavia and Asia. About TwineTwine is a mobile data platform that believes true, honest, accurate data is the fuel that helps our partners grow their businesses efficiently and effectively; Twine’s TrueData is used by brands, agencies, and ad tech partners across the country and across the globe. Twine’s app publisher partners generate revenue while maintaining control over their data; their marketer partners get comprehensive, high quality mobile targeting and intelligence. To learn more about Twine, visit www.twinedata.com.
Marketers Using Centro’s DSP Basis Can Leverage Tapad’s Technology for Extended Cross-device Reach Chicago – May 15, 2018 – Centro, a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced that its Basis programmatic ad platform has licensed cross-device marketing technology from Tapad, a part of Experian, the company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer. Media professionals using Basis can now drive better performance by identifying a person across the different devices he or she uses, serving ads in the most optimum environment, then analyzing performance to see what ad worked best based on creative, device, location and time of day. Today’s digital media ecosystem is fragmented. People consume content on their multiple devices from multiple locations. According to digital analytics firm GlobalWebIndex, a typical consumer owns three digital devices and has seven digital ID’s active in the last 60 days. Advertising technology that treats every device as a single user would not be able to guide customers down the marketing funnel according to how users jump from one device to the next. Furthermore, they wouldn’t see when conversions occur on a device different from that in which the ad was first shown to the user. The Tapad Graph identifies the point of conversion across all screens – smartphones, tablets, home computers, and smart TVs – so that marketers can better gauge the efficiency and return on ad spend. “Our technology helps brands gain a deeper level of understanding of their customer, enabling marketers to better deliver services and products users want,” said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships, Tapad. “With our technology as part of Basis, Centro is providing robust, accessible tools for marketers that want to advance their knowledge of the consumers they want to reach.” Centro’s Basis enables advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. It is the only platform that combines all of these elements with cross-device conversion attribution and advanced reporting features in a DSP. With the Tapad Graph integrated into Basis, marketers can now identify consumers across all of their devices during any point of the consumer journey. This can help marketers determine ad spend effectiveness for optimizing campaigns in real-time or for the future. Other cross-device marketing capabilities for Basis users include: Frequency Capping: Apply frequency caps at a unique person-level rather than at a device-level to prevent saturating users with ads and showing them more impressions than desired. Audience extension: Expand the reach of a campaign by learning what other devices a single user may have, then deliver ads to single users’ other devices. Reporting insights: Learn how users interact with ads across their devices. Gain insight about how consumers respond on devices to improve targeting parameters. Conversion attribution: Record conversions on devices different from that in which the ad was displayed to learn the true effectiveness of advertising efforts. “Cross-device analytics and optimization aligns with our vision that converging the different parts of digital media to create a holistic view of campaigns will drive performance,” said Katie Risch, EVP of customer experience, Centro. “Having Tapad’s powerful capability of personalized marketing gives our advertisers high-quality data to cultivate relationships with customers, wherever they are in digital channels.” About Tapad Tapad Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company's signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world's largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad's numerous awards include: Forbes' Most Promising Companies, Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, Crain's Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award's "Startup Founder of the Year." Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world's largest mobile operators. About Centro Centro is a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising organizations. Its technology platform, Basis, is the first of its kind SaaS advertising solution unifying programmatic and direct media buying, along with workflow automation, cross-channel campaign planning, universal reporting and business intelligence. It boosts media, team and business performance by enabling advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. Headquartered in Chicago with