
Have you wondered how the shift toward real-time data is reshaping the way companies connect with consumers? Traditional methods of third-party data collection and demographic targeting are being replaced by more privacy-conscious approaches. In our next Ask the Expert segment, we explore how Experian and Captify’s partnership is harnessing the power of real-time onsite search data to enhance personalized advertising, address identity fragmentation, and provide valuable insights for navigating modern advertising challenges.
We’re joined by industry leaders, Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships. In this segment, they discuss the complexities of identity and the innovative use of real-time data in digital advertising. Watch the full Q&A below to learn more about these topics and discover how the collaborative efforts of Experian and Captify are shaping the future of personalized advertising.
Understanding the power of real-time marketing data
Real-time data provides an up-to-the-minute view of consumer behavior, enabling marketers to make quick, informed decisions. Captify’s use of real-time search data allows for immediate insights, contrasting with traditional third-party data, which often involves delay and prompted answers. This approach allows marketers to see trends and reactions as they unfold, making it possible to tweak campaigns and strategies and always reach the most in-market consumers. By using Captify’s real-time data, we can predict consumer interests and adapt to market changes quickly.
Staying ahead of market trends with predictive analytics
Captify analyzes more than a billion search signals daily, giving brands a detailed look at changes in audience behavior. These real-time insights help businesses make timely adjustments and reach their audiences in the moments that matter. Beyond digital media, Captify’s multi-channel activation strategy extends to platforms such as connected TV and digital out-of-home, ensuring messages remain relevant and effective.
How Experian and Captify work together
Imagine being able to tailor your ads to consumers’ needs and interests in real time. Our partnership with Captify enhances ad targeting and measurement by combining Experian’s vast Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data. “Captify has evolved beyond relying on third-party cookies in isolation and now uses the Experian Graph to provide a more holistic view of identity at both the individual and household levels” says Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify.
As privacy concerns grow, we have built and continue to invest in a signal-agnostic Digital Graph that can make connections across a wide range of identifiers, including the Experian Living Unit ID (LUID). The LUID is a unique identifier representing each household in the United States, based on real households and real people. This allows essential demographic information to be enriched to a household, enriching first-party data with detailed consumer insights, like age, gender, historical purchase behavior, and future purchase intent. By continuously adding new data and building fresh audiences and segments, we provide greater insights into the consumer base. Our Digital Graph serves as Captify’s identity spine, allowing them to connect identifiers together at both the person and household levels. This helps their clients target ads more accurately across different channels, making it easier to track and understand consumer behavior across platforms like TV, digital, and radio.
Here are five key ways our partnership enhances ad targeting and measurement:
Enhancing personalized advertising with real-time insights
Identity fragmentation is a challenge for marketers because consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Experian and Captify’s partnership provides the fuel to help advertisers by integrating real-time search data with identity graphs, allowing for accurate targeting across various channels. By combining Experian’s robust Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data, advertisers can deliver highly personalized ads on connected TV that retain their relevance and impact, no matter where the consumer engages with the content.
“We ingest the Experian Graph as part of our internal Graph, allowing us to connect identifiers together at both person and household levels, which aligns with our expansion into TV, out-of-home, and audio channels.”
Amelia waddington, chief product officer, captify
Addressing identity fragmentation
A fragmented identity occurs when consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Advertisers need holistic media plans instead of fragmented strategies that risk disengaging consumers, while publishers must demonstrate their platforms’ value by targeting seamlessly.
By enriching and distributing thousands of demographic and behavioral segments, Experian provides the essential data needed to effectively target diverse audiences. Experian’s Digital Graph complements Captify’s data by connecting various identifiers, providing a complete view of individuals and households. This approach helps advertisers overcome fragmentation challenges, and ensure their messages reach the right audience across multiple touchpoints.
Optimizing creative content dynamically
Using real-time data, advertisers can adjust creative elements of their ads to better match consumer interests. This means changing parts of an ad, like images or text, based on current audience data, making it more relevant to the consumer. By partnering with Experian, Captify continues to see a rounded view of a consumer, allowing them to provide clients around the globe with data-driven creatives. These creatives achieve better results than standard ones and enable more meaningful connections with consumers.
Integrating search data into connected TV
Real-time search data plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of connected TV (CTV) advertising. Captify’s identity solution uses persistent identifiers from the Experian Digital Graph to extract value from onsite search data. Machine learning technology then categorizes these searches to understand consumer intent and create highly relevant audiences. By integrating Captify’s consumer intent data, advertisers can deliver more targeted and relevant ads on CTV platforms. This integration helps marketers reach viewers with content that resonates.
Ensuring multi-channel message consistency
Consistency in messaging across multiple channels is key for maintaining brand integrity and consumer trust. By using Experian’s identity data, Captify ensures that advertisers can deliver cohesive messages across various platforms, including TV, digital, and radio. This integration not only enhances ad targeting precision but also solidifies the brand’s presence, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the same core message for a unified brand experience.
Watch the full Q&A
Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Amelia and Chris’ full conversation. In their discussion, they cover identity beyond identifiers, personalized advertising strategies, and the evolving consumer journey. Amelia and Chris also share about interoperability challenges in CTV and how Captify is using alternative IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2).
About our experts

Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify
Amelia is Chief Product Officer at Captify, leading the Product, Engineering, Partnerships and Insight teams globally. During her three years at Captify, Amelia has delivered on her product vision to put Captify’s Search Intelligence in the hands of all advertisers—unlocking competitive advantage for clients and partners in a way that’s omnichannel, strategic, open and future-proof. She has launched Captify’s Advanced TV, cookieless and data partnerships product lines. Amelia brings over a decade of experience in driving product strategy, underpinned by expertise across data science, machine learning, and analytics. She has a PhD in computational neuroscience and previous roles include product leadership at LiveRamp and Aimia.

Chris Feo, SVP, Sales & Partnerships, Experian
As SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris has over a decade of experience across identity, data, and programmatic. Chris joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. He joined Tapad with less than 10 employees and has been part of the executive team through both the Telenor and Experian acquisitions. He’s an active advisor, board member, and investor within the AdTech ecosystem. Outside of work, he’s a die-hard golfer, frequent traveler, and husband to his wife, two dogs, and two goats!
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The home stretch for the holidays is nearing as second wind for retailers is just starting as Experian Marketing Services analyzes the post-Christmas retail trend. Christmas Day 2012 saw a 27% increase in online traffic to the top 500 retail sites compared to 2011. The top retail sites received more than 115.5 million total U.S. visits. To date the holiday online traffic for the past 7 weeks to retail sites are up 10% for 2012 vs. 2011. Each retail holiday milestone day saw online traffic increases so far this season. Amazon remained the top visited site among retailers for this past week ending Dec. 22, 2012 and was also the top visited site on Christmas Day. Walmart, Target, BestBuy and Macy’s round out the top 5 most visited sites. The chart below includes the top 10 results: As tablets dominated our weekly top product search lists all holiday season it wasn’t surprising to see that the Apple iTunes site visits increased 193% and Apple.com visits increased 155% on Christmas Day 2012 vs. Christmas Eve 2012. The top product search terms sending traffic to the Apple.com site were iPod Nano, iPad Mini and iPad 4. Amazon.com visits increased 24% on Christmas Day 2012 vs. Christmas Eve 2012 as the top product search terms sending traffic to their site were Amazon Kindle, Kindle Fire and Kindle Also seeing growth were gift card searches as the year-over-year total search volume for "gift card" variations increased 6.1% this year compared to 2011. The big spike in searches happened last week (as online shoppers passed shipping deadlines). Below are the top 10 gift card searches for last week. We will continue to publish retail site data and insights through this holiday season. Please leave us a comment below if you have any specific questions along the way. UPDATE: The top 500 retail sites received more than 129 million total US visits on Dec. 26th, an increase of 1% compared to 2011 and 12% compared to Christmas Day 2012. Amazon was the top site followed by Walmart, Target, BestBuy and Macy’s. JCPenney, QVC and The Home Depot all moved into the top 10 on the day after Christmas. Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham

Hi, Dana here with an update on my holiday shopping post from before Thanksgiving. Like I thought, I was able to get most of my shopping done that Black Friday weekend. It was all pretty fast and easy, but I did have one not so great experience too. My sister knew I was going to get something for my niece, so when she got an email from Toy World that everything would be 50% off on Black Friday she forwarded it to me to let me know. I was thrilled. I had done some searching for good toys this year and had some ideas. While I normally would shop online, the Toy World coupon said the 50% off was in-store only so I braved the crowds for a good deal. Unfortunately, when I got there I learned that the email was wrong – only select items were 50% off and others were buy one, get one 50% off. I was pretty upset because the hottest toys were the ones excluded from the deal. I came all that way based on the email. I wound up getting a gift, but I could have saved myself the hassle and long lines, especially since I didn’t get a deal that was different from any other day. That was a rough start to the shopping weekend, but, no worries, things improved. I have to tell you about my best shopping experience – I’ve been telling everyone! This year I used Pinterest to see what my mom has had her eye on lately. One of her pins is a food processor and I think that’s a perfect gift for her. I’m a card holder and reward member at Aaron’s department store and I know they carry some really nice kitchen appliances. They also happened to send me great Cyber Monday coupons in the mail – it was perfect timing. I went online on Cyber Monday, used the promo codes from the coupons and not only got great deals, but got free shipping too! How easy was that?! They also sent me shipping notifications so I knew exactly when to expect the package. I am really happy that I got something great for everyone on my list and now have time to enjoy the rest of 2012. I hope you enjoy it too! XOXO, Dana Editor’s note: You can tell that Aaron’s knows Dana. They used their direct mail piece to send her online offers because they know that’s her preferred purchase method. They’ve won her over once again and created a brand advocate. Learn where your company stands in your marketing efforts today, and how you can help move efforts forward to ensure your customers have good experiences like Dana had with Aaron’s, and avoid bad ones like her trip to Toy World.

With the busy holiday marketing season in full swing, Experian Marketing Services has released its online retail round-up for the week ending December 8. The online traffic to the top 500 retail sites increased 5% for the period of December 2 – 8, compared to the same week in 2011. Additionally, Amazon remained the top visited site among retailers, followed by Walmart and Target. The chart below includes the top 10 results: Experian Marketing Services also tracks top product searches. Listed below are the top 5 product searches for the week ending December 8: Uggs iPad mini iPad Beats by dre Ipod touch We will continue to publish weekly retail site data and insights through this holiday season. Please leave us a comment below if you have any specific questions along the way. Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham