Consumers engage with content and advertisements across various devices and platforms, making an identity framework essential for establishing effective connections. An identity framework allows businesses to identify consumers across multiple touchpoints, including the relationships among households, individuals, and their devices. Combined with a robust data framework, businesses can understand the relationship between households, individuals, and marketing attributes. Consequently, businesses can tailor and deliver personalized experiences based on individual preferences, ensuring seamless consumer interactions across their devices.
We spoke with industry leaders from Audigent, Choreograph, Goodway Group, MiQ, Snowflake, and others to gather insights on how innovations in data and identity are creating stronger consumer connections. Here are five key considerations for advertisers.
1. Embrace a multi-ID strategy
Relying on a single identity solution limits reach and adaptability. Recent data shows that both marketers and agencies are adopting multiple identity solutions. By embracing a multi-ID strategy with solutions like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2) and ID5, brands can build a resilient audience targeting and measurement foundation, ensuring campaigns remain effective as identity options evolve across channels.
A diversified identity approach ensures that advertisers are not left vulnerable to shifts in technology or policy. By utilizing multiple ID solutions, brands can maintain consistent reach and engagement across various platforms and devices, maximizing their campaign effectiveness.
“I don’t think it will ever be about finding that one winner…it’s going to be about finding the strengths and weaknesses and what solutions drive the best results for us.”
Stephani Estes, GroupM
2. Utilize AI and machine learning to enhance identity graphs
Identity graphs help marketers understand the connections between households, individuals, their identifiers, and devices. This understanding of customer identity ensures accurate targeting and measurement over time. AI and machine learning have become essential in making accurate inferences from less precise signals. These technologies strengthen the accuracy of probabilistic matches, allowing brands to understand consumer behavior more effectively even when data fidelity is lower.
Adopting a signal-agnostic approach and utilizing various ID providers enhances the ability to view consumers’ movements across platforms. This strategy moves measurement beyond isolated channels, providing a holistic understanding of campaign effectiveness and how different formats contribute to overall performance. By integrating AI and machine learning into identity graphs, advertisers can develop more cohesive and effective marketing strategies that guide customers seamlessly through their buying journey.
“What we’re finding is more and more identity providers are using Gen AI to locate connections of devices to an individual or household that maybe an identity graph would not identify.”
David Wells, Snowflake
3. Balance privacy with precision using AI
AI-driven probabilistic targeting and identity mapping provide effective solutions for privacy-focused advertising. Rather than relying on extensive personal data like cookies, AI can use limited, non-specific information to predict audience preferences accurately. This approach allows advertisers to reach their target audience while respecting privacy—a crucial balance as the industry shifts away from traditional tracking methods.
According to eMarketer, generative AI can further enhance audience segmentation through clustering algorithms and natural language processing. These tools enable more granular, privacy-compliant targeting, offering advertisers a pathway to reach audiences effectively without needing third-party cookies.
“I think the biggest opportunity for machine learning and AI is increasing the strength and accuracy of probabilistic matches. This allows us to preserve privacy by building models based on the features and patterns of the consumers we do know, instead of transmitting data across the ecosystem.”
Brian DeCicco, Choreograph
4. Activate real-time data for better engagement
Real-time data enrichment introduces dynamic audience insights into the bidding process, enabling advertisers to respond instantly to user actions and preferences. This agility empowers marketers to craft more relevant and impactful moments within each campaign.
“Real-time data enrichment–where data companies can have a real-time conversation with the bid stream–is an exciting part of the future, and I believe it will open the door to activating a wide variety of data sets.”
Drew Stein, Audigent
5. Create and deploy dynamic personas using AI
Generative AI transforms persona-building by providing advertisers with richer audience profiles for more precise targeting. This approach moves beyond traditional demographic categories, allowing for messaging that connects more meaningfully with each consumer.
By using generative AI to craft detailed personas, advertisers can move beyond generic messaging to create content that truly resonates on an individual level. This personalized approach captures attention and strengthens consumer relationships by addressing their specific needs and interests.
“One cool thing we’ve built recently is a Gen AI-based personas product that generates personas to create highly sophisticated targeting tactics for campaigns.”
Georgiana Haig, MiQ
Seize the future of data-driven engagement
Focusing on these five key innovations in data and identity allows you to adapt to the evolving media landscape and deliver personalized experiences to your audience.
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Imagine an experiential self-driving car of the future. You step inside, select where you want to go and the best experience within the vehicle for your journey. Within seconds, it safely sweeps you away and drives you to your destination. If only marketing were that easy. At the tap of a console, you are able to identify the best parachute to glide your ads to the right audience, on the right platform. Well, what seems like a distant dream is Experian Marketing Service’s latest solution: Discovery Platform. To introduce Discovery, we asked Sunaina Chaudhary, Director of Product and Innovation, to describe how the solution facilitates effective marketing strategies. Discover more about your consumers. What is Discovery? What marketing challenges does it address? Anywhere you feel like you need to understand your customers, Discovery Platform can help. Whether you want to take your marketing to the next level or get on the road to recovery, Discovery is the solution. We created the Discovery Platform to help our clients overcome today’s advertising challenges, including gaps in data that impede identity linkage, limited internal resources and fragmented data. Think about all the touchpoints surrounding a customer in real life: connected TV ads, social media, email, flyers, digital ads . . . You can probably think of at least 15 off the top of your head. Discovery brings all those touchpoints together into a unified view of your customer. It combines disparate data insights to help you better understand your customers’ individual journeys and the most impactful touchpoints across offline, social and digital channels. Speaking specifically to a use case, in the most simplistic words, marketers can use Discovery to identify the right consumer, plan to reach them through the most optimal channel and create a consistent, relevant and personalized message. You can even leverage Discovery Platform’s seamless integration with our Audience Engine solution to build and deploy custom audiences to a variety of social, digital, email and Connected TV partners. The sales and other customer data flowing back into Discovery, all ties together for the marketing team to inform the next marketing campaign or strategy. Watch the Discovery Platform demo to learn more. Which business verticals does it benefit? Discovery Platform is apt for almost every vertical that I can think of – retail, agency, connected TV, publishers and financial institutions. Even though agencies don’t typically own first-party data, they can still benefit from Discovery through a one-stop shop for their RFP needs and the ability to activate the same audience with a click of a button. Clear cohorts you can activate—without privacy anxiety. Do marketers need to worry about consumer data privacy in the Discovery platform? No, when you’re in Discovery, you’re seeing the best and safest view of your customer cohorts. Marketers can rely on Experian to meet all compliance, governance and privacy standards. That’s taken care of by the time you see the data. Discovery is built on carefully curated and maintained data on 126 million households and 300 million individuals. You can leverage it for insights on over 2,000 consumer attributes such as demographics, home-owner status, shopping behaviors, media consumption habits and more. These are all tied to a unified identity made possible by our identity linkage. To do this, we help pull together your first-party data—along with whatever Experian datasets you license—to create a complete picture of your customer cohorts. It’s always-on, actionable insights you can subscribe to. What most excites you about the Discovery platform? We live in a world full of subscriptions—from TV streaming to food delivery. Data solutions of the past are transactional: you buy consumer data, leave it, and need to update it next week, month or quarter. Marketers have an ongoing need for more up-to-date data. That’s why we built Discovery Platform. World-class marketers need to be proactive when it comes to their customers and their business, which means having access to always-on actionable insights and analytics. Experian’s Discovery platform is here to make recurring market insights safer to access, and easier to collect and put into action. Here are 3 ways you can put Discovery to work for your marketing strategy: Subscribe! You get data-backed insights when you need them to stay up to date on what's happening with your business, customers and campaigns. For example, through mobile location data you can see which geographic areas of your market are returning to stores or still shopping online, glimpse competitor market share and more. Connect insights to your campaign. Discovery Platform is seamlessly integrated with Audience Engine to turn insights into action. This allows you to engage with your audiences via email, social, display, connected TV or whatever channels they prefer. Request a report. Not ready to subscribe? You can still get valuable on-demand reports, whether you have one or 25 target markets. Tell us your audience selection criteria, pick datasets for rich insights and Experian Marketing Services will give you actionable marketing insights for your business. Sign up for our newsletter to receive quarterly updates on what’s new at Experian Marketing Services.
Experian Marketing Services and Data Quality President Genevieve Juillard recently sat down with Zach Rodgers, host of the AdExchanger Talks podcast to discuss the future of identity, the importance of data transparency and privacy, and our recent acquisition of Tapad. Genevieve focused on the opportunity for our industry to reimagine an advertising ecosystem that is resilient and adaptable; one that takes advantage of emerging data and prioritizes data transparency and consumer privacy. She also discussed the importance of advertising strategies that put consumers at the heart of every decision and give them more control over their data. Genevieve shared with AdExchanger that Experian’s acquisition of Tapad, a global leader in digital identity resolution, was a natural fit for our company. Tapad’s approach and role in the ecosystem is very much aligned with Experian’s, which is to develop solutions that are resilient to industry and consumer changes. The combination of our capabilities supports interoperability across all types of identifiers, both online and offline, and will position us to help our clients navigate the post-third-party cookie world. To learn more about Experian’s plans to support an effective advertising ecosystem that will evolve with our dynamic industry, listen to the full podcast Embracing ‘Healthy Fragmentation’ In Ad Tech, With Genevieve Juillard.
It’s been over a year since Google announced they’d be deprecating the third-party cookie and in that time there’s been a major focus on two types of cookieless identity solutions. Identity vendors and marketers are strategizing which of these two future solutions best fits their needs so they can achieve privacy-safe scale once third-party cookies are no longer available for use on Chrome. Let’s break down these solutions and the considerations marketers need to take into account when deciding what partners to move forward with in the future of identity resolution. Authenticated Traffic Solutions Authenticated traffic solutions (ATS) are a type of digital identification that asks the end-user to identify themselves via personal information, most commonly email address. Often, you’ll see self-authentication at the point of entry to a website that asks you to create an account or login immediately to access the content you are seeking. E-commerce sites use authentication to keep track of consumer purchases and inform advertising decisions for that customer; and publishers use it to tailor featured content, or, more importantly for this discussion, leverage it within the ad ecosystem for targeting. While authentication can provide very valuable user data for audience segmenting and targeting, it can be limited in scale for a single publisher to leverage and monetize on their own. That’s why some identity vendors have worked to integrate themselves within as many publisher authentication modules as possible, so that they can create an aggregate of scale for the ad ecosystem to tap into. But, even this isn’t going to deliver the reach marketers truly thirst for. Alternatively, Facebook has the scale for authenticated traffic, but they keep their data inside a walled garden, so the utility of those authenticated users is only valuable within the Facebook ecosystem. So how can authenticated traffic solutions increase scale to broaden the scope of identifiers they can collect and leverage? Hint: a few of the biggest players have already figured it out. It’s the single sign-on. Google is probably the largest purveyor of a single-sign on solution that can directly impact advertising capabilities. Can you think of a site you visit that doesn’t offer a sign-in with your existing Google account? It’s a short list. Google has integrated themselves into so many applications and publishers that “Login with Gmail” is just second nature (you pictured the Gmail logo when you read that, didn’t you?). Now, if you’re about to purchase something you found off an Instagram ad, or perhaps a retailer you buy from regularly, you’ve probably noticed options to proceed with your checkout via “Amazon pay” or “Apple pay”. These are also single-sign ons. You’re authenticating yourself through Amazon or Apple to that retailer in exchange for A- the safety and security that Amazon or Apple provide for your financial information and B- skipping the annoying process of manually entering personal information over and over again at point of sale. It’s starting to sound like there’s a lot of authenticated data out there isn’t it? Well, that’s true, but again, Amazon and Apple are walled gardens. Amazon is working diligently to build out their own ecosystem to leverage their content and retail channel data for a holistic offering. And Apple keeps user data very close to the chest, constantly limiting its utility for themselves and advertisers. So what is identity resolution doing about it? The Trade Desk announced their solution; Unified ID 2.0, which promises to leverage email authenticated identity for a truly scaled solution for publishers via Javascript through Prebid. By handing over UID2.0 to an independent unbiased organization like Prebid, The Trade Desk is creating instant scale and trust in their solution. Unauthenticated Traffic Solutions Unlike ATS, unauthenticated traffic solutions do not rely on a log-in to identify a user, but they also don’t rely on third-party cookies. Instead, unauthenticated solutions (UATS) leverage their existing streams of real-time data through Javascript on publisher sites or an SDK (software development kit used by apps). The type of information UATS solutions can collect via Javascript or SDK vary, but it can include IP address, user agent and device level info. But being able to read this information at the point of entry to a website does not make a quality identifier. The best unauthenticated solutions will have the ability to set or ingest this information into a unique ID through an infrastructure with incredibly fast speed that can process trillions of anonymous data signals across multiple channels and devices. And even more so, be able to interpret those signals into a profile using machine learning– all at the moment a user enters a domain. It sounds complicated because it is, but it also has a lot of potential. The identity space cannot rest solely on authenticated traffic solutions, because, as you can see, it could limit ownership and operability to just a few power players/walled gardens. This doesn’t help the larger ecosystem monetize and personalize ad inventory. The right unauthenticated solution, however, can unify cross-device individuals and households at scale, because they’re integrated on the broadest number of publishers/SDKs across platforms, have the best algorithms to build confident connections between identifiers, and are universally transactable across the most common sell and demand side platforms. Think of it as the perfect partner- speaking a common language that everyone in the ecosystem understands and acts on. Today more than twenty cookieless identifiers are available in market for the ad ecosystem, and Google hasn’t even announced a date of deprecation. It’s important to be on the lookout for differentiators like scale and precision. Most importantly, choosing a truly cross-device partner will be key, especially as more digital devices and IDs grow in adoption, like CTV has this past year. Taking advantage of both What we will come to find, once the third-party cookie is obsolete, is that choosing just one of these solution types, or partners, will be a disadvantage. The more the industry comes together to collaborate on solutions, the more apparent it is that both of them have value, and thus employing both solutions will give marketers the best opportunities. Tapad, now part of Experian, recently announced the launch of Switchboard; a module within our identity solution; The Tapad Graph, to create this agnostic interoperability for identifiers of all types, and choice and control for the ad tech vendors and marketers who want them. By instantly creating the ability to partner with multiple solutions, Tapad + Experian is ensuring that all use cases for the third-party cookie live on in our cookieless future. Get started with The Tapad Graph For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!