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 BRICs markets (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are becoming ever larger forces in the world economy. For some time their growth rates have been faster than those experienced in western economies, and they have borne the recent economic crisis with greater resilience. In many ways it's wrong to refer to the BRICs as "developing" markets — by some measures they can be considered just as developed as the "developed" markets. Manufacturers and service providers have to be interested in the BRICs. Their sheer size, allied with these growth rates, means they offer huge potential. Growth rates in the BRICs for a range of items have been rapid. Data from Global TGI, an international network of market and media research companies spanning over 50 countries and six continents, shows this very clearly. In this post we look at three examples in diverse sectors. These charts show the trend over the last decade in the ownership in the BRICs markets of cars, microwave ovens and bank cards. They are based on the total measured urban adult Global TGI population in all cases. We can also compare this with the trend in the U.S. sourcing data from Experian Simmons. Boom in car ownership There has been dramatic increase in the ownership of cars over the last decade in Russia (80%), India (90%) and China (200% growth). These rates of growth are a clear sign of how economic development spreads wealth and makes items affordable to increasing numbers of consumers. The exception to this picture is Brazil, where car ownership was considerably higher than in the other BRICs at the opening of the new century, and growth has been more serene. By comparison to the BRICs we see from Experian Simmons that in the U.S. (as well as Great Britain) there has been virtually no percentage growth — new purchases are largely replacement purchases. The microwave oven market heats up Purchasing a microwave oven for your home is by no means as expensive an undertaking as purchasing a car, but it requires the availability of sufficient disposable income. In this category we see from Global TGI significant growth in all the BRICs over the last decade — from a 50% increase in Brazil to over 700% in Russia. The growth story in Russia is typical of many categories in fast-growing markets: ten years ago a microwave oven was still an expensive item for most households given their purchasing capacity, and ownership was largely the preserve of the well-off. Subsequently however, it has become affordable as well as being regarded as necessary by most people, and penetration has grown dramatically. As with automobiles, growth of microwave ovens in the U.S. has remained flat with fully 89% of all American homes already owning a microwave. Financial sophistication The growth in ownership of credit and debit cards arises from people's need to manage money, and greater levels of financial sophistication. Clearly it also represents a huge opportunity for financial institutions. It has been striking across all the BRICS — and there is still potential for more, perhaps in India most of all. Again we see from very little growth over the same period in the U.S. and Britain, which were already saturated. Today, 83% of Americans have a debit or credit card, as do 90% of Brits. Consumer growth in the BRICs will continue Across many other categories the same picture can be seen, of rapid growth yet still much further potential. We can anticipate growth in the BRICs and other developing markets continuing to outpace growth in western markets across the full range of consumption categories. With economic growth happening at different speeds this trend seems likely to last for a long time. Furthermore, it's not only that they are growing faster. In population terms, the BRICs together represent 42% of the people of the world. Their large populations mean that they will increasingly dominate world markets in absolute numbers too. When this rapid macro-economic development is considered along with the sheer size of their consumer markets and the speed of their growth evident from these Global TGI figures, it is very clear why many manufacturers are focusing attention very closely on the BRICs. Learn more about how Experian Simmons and Global TGI can provide you with consumer insights across the globe with comparisons to the United States.