Note: This Ask the Expert was recorded prior to Experian’s acquisition of Audigent and discusses industry trends and how we’ve worked together in the past.
Adopting new strategies based on trust due to evolving privacy regulations and the gradual loss of traditional signals, like third-party cookies, is essential to successfully navigating the future of digital advertising. Advertisers and marketers are at a crossroads, facing the challenge of maintaining personalization and precision while respecting consumer expectations around privacy. To stay competitive, brands must adopt future-ready strategies that focus on trust, privacy-forward technologies, and scalable solutions.
In our latest Ask the Expert segment, recorded before Experian acquired Audigent, we explore how first-party data and advanced contextual audience targeting are two critical approaches for successfully navigating these changes. With insights from Greg Williams, President of Audigent, now part of Experian, and Crystal Jacques, VP of Sales at Experian, we discuss how these tools can empower your brand for long-term success.
First-party data as a cornerstone strategy
First-party data, a powerful tool for building meaningful connections with your audience, has emerged as a fundamental pillar of future-ready strategies. When collected and used effectively, it provides brands with a detailed understanding of consumer preferences and behaviors, enabling real-time campaign adjustments for maximum impact.
“Data has become part of every step of the digital advertising supply chain, and should be part of everybody’s buys… the more you can include data in your digital marketing, the better off and the more power you have.”
Greg Williams, President, Audigent
With the continual loss of signal, including third-party cookies, first-party data has proven to be key for brands to stay both competitive and privacy-compliant. Brands using first-party data are better positioned to overcome the challenges of signal loss. This data facilitates improved media targeting and personalized messaging, driving greater engagement and return on investment.
Contextually-Indexed Audiences build relevance
Experian’s Contextually-Indexed Audiences enable advertisers to target users based on their interests in real-time, without relying on cookies or mobile ad IDs. Machine learning analyzes and maps traffic from over two million websites, linking to Experian’s 2,400 audience segments. With added benefits like audience customization and flexible activation through Audigent’s private marketplaces (PMPs) or demand-side platforms, Experian is setting a new standard for scalable audience targeting.
For automotive advertisers, this could mean reaching consumers actively researching luxury electric vehicles on relevant sites. Unlike outdated methods, contextual targeting aligns the message with consumer intent, balancing high precision with consumer privacy.
Automotive success story
Audigent’s innovative solutions have delivered tangible results. Williams mentions how they helped an automotive brand achieve double the scale and triple their goal of driving test drives. This stands as a testament to the real-world effectiveness of contextual audience strategies and Experian’s role in executing them.
How to stay ahead of change
Here are five strategies to help your brand remain future-ready amid privacy challenges and signal loss:
- Prioritize first-party data: Build trust and improve targeting accuracy by relying on data that you own directly from your consumers.
- Test privacy-forward tools: Experiment with solutions like contextual targeting and Google’s Privacy Sandbox to future-proof your advertising.
- Strengthen identity framework: Create systems to securely manage and use data for cross-channel decision making.
- Use scalable tools: Partner with trusted providers to deploy solutions that adapt to changing industry standards.
- Stay proactive and flexible: Continuously evaluate trends and refine approaches to align with emerging consumer and regulatory expectations.
A deeper conversation
For additional insights, watch our full Q&A. Greg Williams and Crystal Jacques discuss the future of audience targeting, how first-party data reshapes marketing strategies, and how Experian and Audigent have collaborated in the past.
About our experts
Greg Williams, President, Audigent
Greg Williams is Audigent’s President, responsible for managing Audigent’s vast portfolio of ecosystem partners, enterprise sales, marketing, and client success. An innovator in programmatic ad buying, Williams co-founded MediaMath and was instrumental in building and scaling that company in the US and internationally. He led MediaMath’s international expansion in 2011 and grew that business from zero to a top revenue driver for the company in three years. During his 14 years at the company, Williams held global roles and built teams across every function of the organization — most notably leading business and market development, product development, and partnerships. Prior to co-founding MediaMath, Williams held senior positions at [X+1] (which was later acquired by RocketFuel), Nielsen, and Accenture.
Crystal Jacques, Head of Enterprise Sales, Experian
Head of Enterprise Partnerships, leading Experian’s go-to-market team across all verticals. With over ten years of experience in the Identity space, Crystal brings a wealth of expertise to her role. She joined Experian in 2020 through the Tapad acquisition, following her successful stint as the head of Global Channel Partnerships for Adbrain, which The Trade Desk later acquired.
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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. 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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. 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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. 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