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.
Latest posts
It’s the holiday season! For some, this is the time of year for family, friends and reflection. For the other 97 percent* of us, it’s time to shop! America’s obsession with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping season has never been stronger. Or weaker? Or something? All I know is that you should be skeptical of anything you see regarding the Thanksgiving weekend performance. And now, I will tell you about the Thanksgiving weekend performance We’re not discussing revenue in this post. Instead, we’ll dive into the weekend’s email subject lines – more specifically, how “percent off” deals affected email open rates. As everyone knows, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days for deals. Juicy “percent off” offers motivate customers to buy, buy, buy. But is the conventional wisdom, that “a deep discount will get people to engage with my brand,” actually right? A few weeks ago, my counterpart in the UK published an analysis of how percentage off discounts influence open rates. Taking the cue from Karl, I wanted to expand this analysis into the U.S. market, paying special attention to Thanksgiving weekend. To begin, I gathered data on a few thousand mailings from our largest retail clients. To determine the baseline expected open rates, I averaged each brand’s performance in the 6 weeks prior to Black Friday. I then analyzed all the mailings sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, dividing the subject lines based on the appearance of a percentage off offer. Interestingly, percentage off offers were less prominent than I expected: And when percentages off were present… their values were all over the place: Higher volume doesn’t lead to improved performance Conventional wisdom would suggest that advertising a discount more frequently would lead to better performing discounts. The data, however, doesn’t support that idea. When I looked at volume distribution and relative performance for each advertised discount, I found a relatively strong negative correlation of -0.63. So the more frequently a discount was advertised, the worse it tended to perform. We can see this visually in the chart below: On average, advertising discounts did not significantly improve open rates. What happened? The first thing to note here is the wide spread in the data – some percentage off discounts worked very well! Overall, though, shouting about a discount wasn’t what convinced customers to open emails during the holidays. But maybe it wasn’t just the percentage off discounts that faltered this season – perhaps all opens were down? As you can see in the histogram above – this wasn’t the case. The average mailing not touting a percentage off discount did ever so slightly better than the baseline average. Still, the spread of data is very wide, with a lot of variation in results. It could be that the dispersion of results was a product of each brand’s initial baseline; brands that normally had great engagement would see positive gains for percentage off discounts while brands with poor engagement would see little to negative lifts, or vice versa. But this hypothesis was also proven incorrect, as the relative starting place for each brand versus the discount performances had a correlation approaching zero. No matter which way I sliced it, the performance of discounted subject lines were more or less random. Ultimately, this last point is the most important. The subject line, for all its ubiquity and focus, is probably a lot less influential than we tend to believe. Sure, a subject line can be optimized, carefully crafted to invoke the greatest lift in response possible, but the baseline expected performance is influenced by a much larger conversation – the one between the brand and its customers. If the brand relationship has been cultivated and refined through intelligent interactions and sophisticated targeting, the open rate is likely going to be higher. If every marketing message simply shouts, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, and there is no larger value-add, engagement probably won’t be great. Advertising a discount in a subject line might really help get people involved – or it might not. So what is the future of the subject line? Are they worth the disproportionate time and energy that marketing organizations tend to spend on them? Or should we recognize that their importance is probably minimal? The truth is, it’s a little bit of both. Subject lines are important – they are the first impression and often the first interaction of the day with a customer. But their importance is likely inversely related to the strength of the brand (the “from” line, if you will). The stronger the relationship is, the less important the subject line becomes. Maybe that’s the ideal – a perfect “from” name, one that tells you more about what’s inside the message than a subject line ever could. *Not a real stat Connect with Jacob Davis, Senior Analyst, on Twitter: @davisj2007.
Before we get to the gift guides, here’s a brief update on the hottest products from the week including Cyber Monday. This week’s biggest movers and new additions to the list are a clear sign that Christmas is upon us. “Star Shower,” a laser light that bathes your house in festive lights without having to untangle cords, jumped to second place, up 49 rank points from the week prior. Likewise, the return of “Elf on the Shelf” to the hot products list coincides with his return to the homes of children nationwide. Otherwise, things seems to have stabilized with Fitbit showing no signs of falling from first place and Pie Face game being this year’s sensation. Toys Shopkins remains the toy to beat this season followed by Pie Face game, which remained in second place after skyrocketing interest during the week of Thanksgiving. Toys new to the top 10 this week include some old favorites like the Easy Bake Oven and Paw Patrol toys as well as the new entrant Glammin Salon Vanity. Keep checking back each week for the latest hot toys. This chart shows the 10 most searched for toys and games based on search clicks to Toys “R” Us – USA. Gift guide insight When it comes to buying presents for the holidays, some individuals are easy to shop for while others require a bit of inspiration. And when consumers need inspiration, consumers turn to the Web. Searches for “gifts for,” “gift guide” and “gift ideas” grow increasingly common as we get closer and closer to Christmas with peak search activity around this topic typically observed during the last full week before Christmas, which this year would be the week ending Saturday December 19th. Some of the most common gift recipients mentioned in gift guide-related searches are: “men,” “guys,” “her,” “mom,” “dad” and “girlfriend.” But shoppers are also frequently looking for suggestions on the perfect gift for someone very specific interests, such as “hunters,” “gamers” and “beer lovers” as well as specific types of gifts, like “tech” or “personalized.” The following gift guide insights, derived using our new AudienceView platform, were designed to highlight for you, as a marketer, the interests and preferences of key consumer segments so that you can more effectively tailor your campaigns to be more relevant and engaging. But if it also helps you, as a consumer, come up with the perfect gift for that hard-to-shop-for person in your life, then even better! Each gift guide contains a representative mix of search terms that were performed at above average rates by each audience segment during the four weeks ending November 28, 2015. They include a mix of product and retail brands and provide a good idea of the interests, style preferences and lifestyles of each audience. Learn more about how AudienceView can deliver unparalleled insights into your consumer audience so that you can deliver a better brand experience.
It’s October, and you know what that means; leaves are changing, sweaters are being pulled out of the closet, pumpkin-flavored items are taking over coffee shops. For many marketers, this is the most exciting (and stressful) part of the year. Holiday marketing is ramping up, and it will only increase in intensity as the weeks go on. Luckily, we’re hard at work here at Experian, analyzing data from past holiday seasons to bring you the insights you need to make your holiday marketing programs successful. We’ve examined search and email behavior to compile a list of the most important days to email and trends that will help you delight your customers from now until the New Year. You can access all of these insights in our Holiday 2015 Marketing Insights Calendar, which covers marketing trends from October through December. Holiday marketing tips for October With Halloween fast approaching at the end of the month (and Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday not far behind), marketers should use October to solidify their plan for the holiday season. Here are three things you can do to optimize your impact this month: 3 ways to optimize your holiday marketing programs in October Target reactivation campaigns to last year’s holiday-only shoppers to maximize active subscribers this season Perform a data cleanse and email verification to ensure message delivery. List health is key to a successful holiday season, and now is the time to double check. Consider offering Halloween-specific products for the little ones. Costumes for newborns and toddlers are on the rise, so don’t forget about the youngsters! Want more holiday marketing insights? Don’t miss our upcoming webinar, Check your list twice: Last-minute marketing strategies for the holiday season.