A few weeks ago, Experian and OpenX hosted a supply-side think tank at our New York City office. Over 70 industry leaders met to talk about targeting in a cookieless future and how we can reach consumers in intentional ways.
Publishers and supply-side partners shared what challenges they face, what solutions they’re considering, and what the future holds once the third-party cookie begins to deprecate in 2024. In this blog post, we’ll cover the top challenges, cookieless solutions, and actionable strategies we discussed at the event that can help publishers, their partners, and agencies make informed decisions about how to navigate tomorrow’s digital ecosystem.
Four main challenges
Four main challenges were discussed at the event:
First-party data monetization
Publishers possess a wealth of first-party data, but collecting and centralizing this information can be difficult for actionable insights. Streamlining data centralization and organizing first-party data is crucial for effective decision-making. Even with a wealth of first-party data, it’s important to be aware of any blind spots in your data and enrich those gaps with data partners rooted in offline connections.
“We appreciate the opportunity to participate in the supply-side think tank led by OpenX and Experian, two industry leaders in navigating a cookieless future. We’re excited to collaborate with them on testing privacy sandbox APIs, identity resolution products, and audience development tools to enhance creator monetization and support an open internet amidst rapid technological and regulatory shifts.”
Patrick McCann, SVP, Research, Raptive
Lack of authenticated data and persistent IDs
The deprecation of third-party cookies means there will be a shortage of authenticated user data and persistent identifiers. Without this information, targeting and personalization become more challenging. Participants discussed the need to find alternative ways to gather and use personal data responsibly. It’s time to start evaluating data partners who have accurate, multi-source compiled, privacy-compliant data with the dedication to reach and recency.
Fragmentation and scale with alternative IDs currently in the market
The multitude of alternative identifiers in the market poses a challenge for publishers. Each of these identifiers comes with its own set of rules and integration processes, leading to fragmentation and complexity. Publishers must find ways to navigate this landscape. Look to ID agnostic partners who provide a way to access multiple IDs at scale.
“The industry needs a more streamlined standard to integrate alternative IDs, given the ongoing challenges of third-party cookie deprecation, measurement, and clean rooms. This burden falls heavily on product and engineering teams, who must prioritize and address these issues one at a time.”
Ryan Boh, Head of Identity, Lockr
Time
Cookie deprecation is almost here. It is crucial to organize your legal, engineering, and product resources, and align internal go-to-market strategies. Establish partnerships that work with your team to follow these timelines and help build phased or cohesive strategies to prepare for a path to monetization. It is imperative to establish a sense of urgency and not wait for others to take the lead. Start testing now to determine if your infrastructure is ready and capable. Many partners who attended the think tank offered insights on how they’ve been tackling challenges to help their industry peers.
Solutions and action plans for a cookieless future
Participants discussed ways they are starting to prepare for a cookieless future and other approaches on their roadmaps:
Work with data partners heavily rooted in offline data across the ecosystem
Enriching your first-party data with partners who rely on offline IDs can help bridge gaps in your audience knowledge. This approach allows you to build a more complete audience profile while third-party cookies are still operational.
Experian is rooted in deterministic offline data and has decades of experience managing it safely. We have insights on over 250 million U.S. consumers and 126 million U.S. households. With our digital technology assets, we bring in 4 billion devices and 1 trillion device signals to definitively connect offline records to online identifiers. With Experian identity widespread adoption throughout the industry, we’re able to provide a common language for us all to collaborate. Experian identity organizes people into households, links their digital devices and IDs to them, enriches their identity with behavioral attributes, and then makes this data actionable in any environment, all while maintaining consumer privacy and data regulations.
“Experian’s supply-side think tank provided a platform for publishers and AdTech companies to discuss the challenges posed by cookie deprecation, privacy regulation updates, and identity restrictions. It highlighted the need for AdTech companies to assist publishers in addressing anonymous users without requiring a value exchange — fostering a mutually beneficial and privacy-compliant open web solution.”
Anthony Caccioppoli, Head of AdTech & Solutions, Insider
Develop your own persistent ID
Creating and maintaining a proprietary persistent ID can be a valuable cookieless solution. It provides control and independence in the new environment post cookie, giving publishers the ability to maintain a consistent user profile.
Use your data to expand contextual targeting opportunities
Contextual targeting involves placing ads based on the content of the web page rather than user data. In the absence of cookies, this strategy can prove effective in reaching relevant audiences.
“The masking or deprecation of IP addresses will eventually impact the availability of addressable IDs in non-authenticated web environments. In addition to ensuring maximum resiliency of our Graph and increasing support for authentication-based IDs, we are also investing in research and development around the use of other signals, such as contextual data, to maintain behavioral targeting inside non-authenticated environments. We will be sharing our findings and future plans in this space in the coming months.”
Budi Tanzi, VP, Product, Experian
Facilitate a knowledge exchange
Reach out to your network to find out what others are testing and what’s working. Start collaborating with agencies and brands across the buy-side to meet their needs.
“The collaborative spirit displayed by our partners constantly inspires me. Listening to the obstacles our industry faces allows this community to build strong relationships, create action plans, and deliver true value.”
Carly Allcorn, Account Executive, Publisher & Supply-Side Partnerships, Experian
Invest in an identity graph
Invest in an identity graph provider to sync first-party cookies and addressable IDs. This ensures that your data remains accessible and actionable in a cookieless world.
“Many participants at our think tank with Experian expressed the need to find an identity solution while also exploring other ways they can start to address cookie deprecation while maintaining business as usual.”
Callie Askenas, Director of Publisher Development, OpenX
How Experian and OpenX can help
Graph from Experian captures all available digital identifiers in real-time and resolves them back to individuals and households. We’re signal agnostic, continuously expand the IDs we support, and futureproof identity resolution through a combination of deterministic, probabilistic, and cookieless identifiers.
Experian is a key player in OpenX’s OpenAudience solution and helps to power many of their data segments as well as their identity graph. While OpenX collaborates with a variety of providers and operates a fully interoperable platform, Experian remains valuable to the core technology within OpenX’s supply-side platform (SSP).
Experian can help you prepare for the cookieless future
It’s clear that the cookieless future poses some unique challenges for publishers, but there are solutions. Publishers and their supply-side partners can come up with strategies to target consumers in intentional ways by continually testing multiple identifiers and cookieless solutions, developing their own persistent ID, creating velvet rope content, and returning to contextual targeting. Collectively, these actionable strategies can help ensure that publishers have a more successful transition into a cookieless future.
Experian has been preparing for signal loss for quite some time and we continue to make substantial investments to ensure our resiliency and the resiliency of our customers. We continue to diversify our signal creating profiles with more persistent identifiers which allows us to pair authentication-based universal identifiers such as UID2 into our Graph seamlessly.
Experian is ready and we are here to navigate the future of privacy together.
To find out more about how Experian can help you prepare for the cookieless future, get in touch with a member of our team today.
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The advertising ecosystem has seen significant transformation over the past few years, with increased privacy regulation, changes in available signals, and the rise of channels like connected TV and retail media. These changes are impacting the way that consumers interact with brands and how brands understand and continue to deliver relevant messages to consumers with precision. Experian has been helping marketers navigate these changes, and as a result, our marketing data and identity solutions underpin much of today’s advertising industry. We’re committed to empowering marketers and agencies to understand and reach their target audiences, across all channels. Today, we are excited to announce our acquisition of Audigent—a leading data and activation platform in the advertising industry. With Audigent’s combination of first-party publisher data, inventory and deep supply-side distribution relationships, publishers, big and small, can empower marketers to better understand their customers, expand the reach of their target audiences and activate those audiences across the most impactful inventory. I am excited to bring together Audigent’s supply-side network as a natural extension to our existing demand-side capabilities. Audigent’s ability to combine inventory with targeted audiences using first-party, third-party and contextual signals provides the best of all worlds, allowing marketers to deliver campaigns centered on consumer choices, preferences, and behaviors. The addition of Audigent further strengthens our strategy to be the premier independent provider of marketing data and identity, ultimately creating more relevant experiences for consumers. To learn more about Experian and Audigent, visit https://www.experian.com/marketing/ and https://audigent.com/.
Retail media has been on everyone’s radar for a while. Commerce media has also established itself as a significant player in the AdTech industry over the past few years. While retail media focuses on engaging customers within a retailer’s ecosystem, commerce media goes beyond these boundaries to capture the entire shopping journey, spanning multiple touchpoints, channels, and platforms.But what is commerce media, and why should we care? Commerce media is here to stay Estimated to hit $33.86 billion this year and more than double by 2028, the hunt is on to capture as much of retail media’s projected ad spend as possible. However, given the numerous verticals expanding their retail media strategy to include any touchpoint within the commerce channel, it might be time to lower the retail media flag and hoist the LUMA dubbed "commerce media flag." So why are Travel, Financial Services, and other verticals focusing on the commerce media ship? Authenticated and digital users (usually app-driven) Consented data that provides unique insight into the household’s or consumer’s intent/purchase behavior Emerging focus on advertising as an important revenue stream for the future With all this “data” at their disposal — why is it not smooth sailing for commerce media to build an ad-supported business? What’s missing for them to acquire the lucrative billions efficiently and effectively? Why retail media networks are important Retail media networks (RMNs) are now a major tool for brands to connect with shoppers. These networks gather valuable data from customers who browse and shop on e-commerce sites and apps. What makes RMNs so powerful is that they allow brands to advertise directly to people who are already interested in buying, leading to more successful sales. For marketers, RMNs offer a clear way to reach potential customers and ensure their advertising dollars are well spent. But as competition grows and consumer habits change, these networks must keep improving. To stay ahead, brands will have to find new ways to use RMNs effectively, linking them with other parts of the commerce media world to unlock even greater results. Differences between building a loyalty program and developing ad products Loyalty programs are the backbone of commerce media networks; however, creating a loyalty program is much different than building an advertising product. It requires commerce companies to bring on additional people, technology, and partners to execute flawlessly. There are four areas to consider: 1. Organizing your data at scale To successfully build an ad-supported business at scale, data must be organized to initiate action (targeting and/or measurement). However, this requires changes in company culture. Both the business and technology infrastructure must be updated. Additionally, commerce media companies must update their mindset around creating and selling products. 2. People We have seen this story before, with large opportunities comes the requirement for new talent. Where are we seeing commerce media companies recruit from? AdTech and MarTech. Whether it’s engineers or data scientists, business development and partnership leads, or even your direct sales team, the poaching has begun. To build a successful business around advertising, experts are needed who can navigate the waters. 3. Partner vs. build The Requests for Information (RFIs) and Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for any combination of agency, demand-side platform, supply-side platform, customer data platform, identity graph, clean room, and beyond are piling up. One trend is clear: commerce media companies are looking for collaborative partners to provide a true strategic partnership to take on the complexities of the transition away from retail media. 4. Identity will remain the keystone to success All commerce media companies have some identity data that reveals a slice of their customers’ viewpoint. Yet, unlocking the broad view of these audiences is crucial to success. These companies need to use the “full pie” to see well-rounded profiles, gain the reach required to access them across many channels, and turn opportunities into revenue. Advertisers can finally close the loop with commerce media networks Commerce media companies with real-time transaction data enable advertisers to see true ROI on their ad spend when products move off the shelves. Measuring real product lift/sale touch points across multiple channels will put performance and measurement front and center. Programmatic was the promise of performance advertising. Well, commerce media may finally fulfill that vow, creating enough value for companies to make it a real competitor to social channels. While retail media will always exist, the transition to commerce media has become increasingly popular and is here to stay. The journey might not be a straight shot to perfect results, but the data, partnerships, and resources are out there and ready to hop aboard to help guide commerce media companies to success. The future of commerce media Commerce media shows no signs of slowing down. More industries are seeing the benefit of making every customer touchpoint an opportunity to drive sales. Whether through social media shopping or in-app purchases, commerce media pushes businesses to create smoother, more connected shopping experiences for consumers. In the future, brands won’t just compete on prices or products — they’ll stand out by offering simple, seamless shopping experiences across all devices. With better data and tools to track consumer behavior, brands will be able to personalize their ads and measure their success in real time. Commerce media allows brands to see a direct link between their ads and sales. Those who can adapt and keep up with these changes will come out on top. Create a connected customer view with Experian At Experian, we empower RMNs to unlock the full potential of their first-party data through comprehensive identity and audience solutions. Our data-driven capabilities enable RMNs to build a deeper understanding of their customers, optimize audience targeting across channels, and create enriched, actionable segments that drive measurable outcomes. By seamlessly connecting our offline and digital data, we help RMNs organize identities into households, device IDs, and more. Each household is enriched with valuable marketing insights, allowing you to gain better customer understanding, create targeted advertising, and reach the right customers across different devices. Additionally, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. With our support, RMNs can maximize revenue opportunities, extend reach, and confidently demonstrate the value of the network to advertisers. Contact us today to find out how Experian can help you succeed in commerce media. Contact us Latest posts
Originally appeared on MarTech Series Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today's complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers. We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever. This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer. Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed. 2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet. The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising. This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach. 2015-2020: The age of walled gardens From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments. However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms. The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web. 2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking. Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments. Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape. With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer. 2025: The omnichannel imperative Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up. The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable. Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Adapting to the future of identity The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant. 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