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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In this article…The rise of omnichannel retailingData and identity-related retail marketing challengesStrategies to help you overcome retail marketing challengesExperian can help advance your retail marketing strategies The questions that keep retail marketers up at night have evolved significantly over the last decade. It wasn’t long ago that marketers would spend their time debating which highway to place their billboard on, whether or not their next TV commercial should be comical or heart-tugging, or even what the optimal time of day was to blast an email campaign to their entire customer list. In 2024, retail marketing has new challenges on the radar. The rise of omnichannel retailing The modern, digital-savvy customer expects a flawless and interconnected shopping experience across touchpoints — one of the many reasons omnichannel marketing is on the rise. Research shows that over half of B2C consumers engage with between three and five channels whenever they make a purchase. For businesses, omnichannel engagement is a lucrative opportunity; McKinsey reports that customers who engage across channels shop nearly twice as much as those using a single channel and usually spend more money. However, the rise in omnichannel engagement also presents several retail marketing challenges, such as the complexity of managing vast amounts of data and piecing together an accurate picture of consumer behavior. Data and identity-related retail marketing challenges Today’s data-driven environment has turned the retail marketing landscape on its head, and businesses have a whole new set of struggles that revolve around identity and data. We identified the top five retail marketing challenges and how to solve them. 1. Knowing what data to capture In the omnichannel era, online and offline data is abundant. When a customer shops at a physical store, they create data points like: What items they purchased What time they visited How long they were there When the same customer shops online, they create a whole new set of data points, such as: What device they used Which items they browsed but didn’t purchase How long they spent on specific pages The vast available data can overwhelm retailers and make it a challenge to determine which data points to prioritize. Start by identifying the challenge you’re addressing. By defining your problem, you can better decide which data is most relevant. For instance, if you’re optimizing the timing of incentives, analyze when customers shop most frequently and customize offers based on individual behavior patterns. How Experian’s Activity Feed can help Experian Activity Feed connects online and offline data to promote precise targeting and measurement across mobile, web, connected TV (CTV), and more. We provide addressable insights that work across all channels by integrating real-time device IDs, cookies, and IP addresses. Our case study with Cuebiq, found here, discusses how we used Activity Feed to deliver in-store lift analyses to Cuebiq’s clients. Because our impressive breadth of addressable data works across channels, we’re perfectly positioned to be your comprehensive identity solution, as we’re capable of addressing the entire U.S. population. With access to over 250 behavioral and demographic attributes per individual, our data fills in audience gaps to help you create a complete customer profile. 2. Understanding customer behavior The complexity of modern consumer behavior is growing, and one of the biggest retail marketing challenges is merging all this information into a single unified customer view. With consumers moving seamlessly between devices like tablets, mobile phones, and laptops, retailers face the grueling task of keeping up with their fragmented journey. For instance, a customer may spot a pair of shoes in-store, add them to their cart via mobile due to long cashier lines, and finish the purchase later from their laptop. However, if they cannot be recognized across these touchpoints, they may abandon the purchase out of frustration. Retailers need solutions that link offline customer relationship management (CRM) and purchase data with a customer's online activity, regardless of channel or device. This is where Experian identity resolution and Graph come into play. How Experian’s Graph and identity resolution can help Experian’s identity solutions help brands resolve disparate data by merging fragmented identifiers into a singular customer profile for a 360-degree view. We ensure each touchpoint is connected, whether the interaction happens online or offline, across mobile apps, or in-store. This enables retailers to recognize the same customer across various devices and enhances the customer experience by keeping items in their cart and personalizing their journey across platforms. With Experian’s identity graph, brands can further enrich these customer profiles with digital identifiers that span hashed emails (HEMs), cookies, mobile device IDs (MAIDs), IP addresses, universal IDs, and CTV IDs to create a more accurate, actionable view of consumer behavior. We rebuild the graph weekly, which ensures persistent and refreshed connections between households, individuals, and their devices. This ongoing linkage allows for precise targeting and measurement over time and aligns with privacy standards and compliance obligations. By organizing identity into households and device IDs and enriching them with marketing data, brands can gain deeper customer insights, addressability across devices, and the ability to measure the impact of their retail marketing strategies. 3. Building trust between consumers and your brand Trust is the foundation of online relationships, and consumers who trust your brand are likelier to share their data. To establish this trust, retailers must collect customer data transparently and respectfully. According to Experian data, 80% of consumers believe more transparency around the use of their information fosters greater trust in a business. Additionally, the same data revealed that 56% of companies plan to invest more in transparency initiatives, such as consumer education, clearer terms of communication, and consumer control over personal data. Experian’s commitment to data accuracy and transparency further strengthens this trust. Our data is ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset, which means you can power smarter insights, targeting, and measurement using the highest-rated, most reliable data to build customer profiles. 4. Establishing customer loyalty with retail marketing Today’s consumer has many opportunities and choices available at their fingertips, which makes it harder for retailers to build and maintain customer loyalty. Signal loss and the rise of omnichannel media consumption have made it even more of a challenge to keep loyal customers. By using data and insights to interact with people more meaningfully, you can overcome these difficulties to provide a more personalized, relevant experience and establish loyalty. Experian’s new Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes solution makes it easier to do just that. Experian’s Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes solution Using our Digital Graph and Marketing Attributes, you can gain comprehensive insights into consumer behavior by combining offline and digital data through our Living Unit ID (LUID). Our Digital Graph provides robust digital identifiers like MAIDs, CTV IDs, HEMs, and universal IDs, while our Marketing Attributes offer detailed consumer insights spanning age, gender, purchase behaviors, and content consumption habits. With this data, you can create relevant messaging and informed audience segmentation to enhance your personalization and targeting efforts across all digital channels. Using our solution can help you deliver what customers need when they need it — like winter gear before a ski trip or swimwear before a beach vacation. These personalized experiences drive additional revenue and build lasting relationships that keep customers coming back, establishing a strong foundation of loyalty in an increasingly competitive market. 5. Finding your technology solution Retailers need to integrate technology to make their data actionable and use it to streamline the customer experience. They need to integrate data storage platforms with fulfillment and reporting solutions, such as email service providers, display networks, and marketing intelligence tools. Whether retailers are exploring the industry or gearing up to make a substantial investment in the right technology partner, it’s vital to ensure you evaluate potential partners equally and consistently. Experian works with major platforms, marketers, and agencies, meaning we have existing partnerships across the ecosystem for you to connect with that can bring your consumer data to life and meet your needs. Our offline and digital graphs are baked into partner integrations so customers can achieve higher match rates that improve addressability. Strategies to help you overcome retail marketing challenges When it comes to modern retail marketing, you’ll need to take a strategic approach to handle emerging challenges. Here are five retail trends of 2024 to consider integrating into your retail marketing strategy: Use predictive analytics: Data can be overwhelming, but you can analyze historical purchase patterns to capture and prioritize the most relevant data for your retail marketing efforts. Optimize omnichannel campaigns: Cross-channel data integration can help you ensure consistent messaging, provide a seamless experience, capture a unified view of customer interactions, and improve engagement. Personalize experiences with AI: Utilize AI data capture across touchpoints to create personalized recommendations and tailored experiences that resonate with individual customer preferences and behaviors. Adopt dynamic pricing: Use real-time data to adjust prices based on customer behavior and market conditions so your pricing strategies align with current demand and maximize revenue. Invest in customer experience tech: Virtual fitting rooms, augmented reality, and other advanced technologies allow customers to engage with your brand across platforms, which can improve their shopping experience. Utilize Experian’s retail media network (RMN) solution Experian’s solution for RMNs is another tool for overcoming retail marketing challenges. We empower RMNs to better understand their customers with unified views of online and offline behavior across channels and extend their reach across environments. Using our top-ranked identity and audience services, we can help RMNs access expanded customer insights, enhance cross-channel audience targeting, and improve real-time measurement and attribution to enable precise, streamlined, personalized omnichannel campaigns. Our solution’s integration with major platforms improves data match rates and addressability so retailers can overcome data fragmentation and optimize their retail marketing strategies. Experian can help advance your retail marketing strategies Experian can help retailers effectively use data and insights to interact with customers and prospects meaningfully. Our data and identity solutions help you deliver relevant, impactful messaging to ensure the customer who puts shoes in the cart at the store is the same customer who wants to finalize their transaction later that evening online. As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to refine your retail marketing strategies and connect authentically with shoppers. With over a billion consumers preparing to shop, Experian offers 19 new syndicated audiences available for activation across major ad platforms, including TV and programmatic, to help you reach the most relevant prospects. Whether you’re targeting discount seekers, last-minute gift-buyers, or frequent travelers, our audiences align with diverse shopping styles and preferences. Choosing the right audience segments aligns your holiday marketing efforts with consumer expectations and maximizes impact. With our tools, you can seamlessly connect with the same customer across various channels, whether they’re shopping in-store or online. Embrace the holiday season confidently, and let Experian help your retail marketing strategy shine. Get started with us today Latest posts
The holiday season is almost here, and knowing how each generation plans to shop can give your holiday advertising campaigns the edge you need. Our recent survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers reveals 2024 holiday shopping trends for each generation and key insights into their anticipated spending levels, preferred shopping categories, and how they look for gift ideas. In this blog post, we'll explore three 2024 holiday shopping trends across generations: Projected consumer spending Top categories on shoppers' lists Preferred channels for researching gifts 1. Projected consumer spending Over 1 in 3 Gen Z and Millennials are gearing up to increase their holiday budgets this year, while Gen X and Boomers are likelier to stick to last year's budget. 36% of Millennials and Gen Z plan to spend more this holiday season 45% of Gen X and 52% of Boomers expect their spending to remain consistent with last year What this means for marketers These insights highlight the importance of tailoring your messaging. For Gen Z and Millennials, emphasize value and unique offerings that justify increased spending. For Gen X and Boomers, focus on trust and reliability, reinforcing their confidence in your brand. How Experian can help you target these audiences Experian’s custom and syndicated audience segments, including Holiday Shopper High Spenders and Holiday Shopper Moderate Spenders, enable you to connect with these diverse consumer groups. Our audiences are available on-the-shelf of leading ad platforms to help you reach people across social, TV, and mobile. The election effect U.S. holiday retail sales saw 4.1% YoY growth in 2016 and 8.3% YoY growth in 2020 following presidential elections. There’s a chance that holiday spending increases after the 2024 election, regardless of the outcome. Experian has 240+ politically relevant audiences that you can activate across major ad platforms ahead of the upcoming election. 2. Top categories on shoppers' lists Different generations have distinct preferences when it comes to what they plan to buy. Gift cards top the list for Gen X and Boomers, while Gen Z leans toward clothing. Millennials are looking to splurge on toys, electronics, and experiences. 69% of Boomers and Gen X plan to purchase gift cards 72% of Gen Z will buy clothing 45% of Millennials will buy health and beauty items 25% of Millennials will buy tickets and 22% of Millennials will buy experiences What this means for marketers Align your product offerings and promotions with each generation's preferences to capture their attention. For example, highlighting versatile gift cards may resonate more with older generations, while showcasing trendy apparel and tech gadgets will appeal to younger consumers. How Experian can help you target these shoppers We offer audience segments like Holiday Shoppers: Apparel, Cosmetics & Beauty Spenders, and Toys Shoppers that you can activate to connect with consumers primed to purchase in these categories. We recently released 19 new holiday shopping audiences we recommend targeting to drive engagement and conversions. Download our audience recommendations here. 3. Preferred channels for researching gift ideas When it comes to finding the perfect gifts, Gen Z turns to social media, while Millennials prefer online reviews and video content. Boomers and Gen X are more inclined to visit physical stores for hands-on product evaluations. 29% of Gen Z and 26% of Millennials will look for gift ideas on social media 44% of Millennials will rely on video reviews and product demos on platforms like YouTube 49% of Gen X and Boomers plan to visit physical stores to evaluate products in person What this means for marketers Understanding where each generation looks for inspiration can guide your content and ad placement strategy. To engage Gen Z, focus on social media campaigns and influencer partnerships. For Millennials, consider investing in video content and reviews. For older generations, ensure your in-store experience is optimized to convert browsing into purchases. How Experian can help you engage these shoppers Our TrueTouchTM audiences can help you pair the perfect messaging styles with the right channels and calls to action. Our Social media channel and content engagement audiences can help you reach Gen Z who are likely to be active users on major social platforms and are Black Friday shoppers. For a full list of Experian’s syndicated audiences and activation destinations, download our syndicated audiences guide. Download our report for five 2024 holiday shopping trends by generation Understanding 2024 holiday shopping trends by generation can help you tailor your targeting, messaging, media planning, and creative based on the generation you’re targeting. In addition to the insights covered here, download our 2024 Holiday spending trends and insights report to learn: When consumers plan to shop (hint: they're already shopping) Where they plan to shop (online vs. in-store) Download our full report to access all five of our predictions by generation, so you can address the diverse needs of this year's holiday shoppers. Download now When you work with Experian for your holiday shopping campaigns, you’re getting: Accurate consumer insights: Better understand your customers’ behavioral and demographic attributes with our #1 ranked data covering the full U.S. population. Signal-agnostic identity solutions: Our deep understanding of people in the offline and digital worlds provides you with a persistent linkage of personally identifiable information (PII) data and digital IDs, ensuring you accurate cross-device targeting, addressability and measurement. Secure connectivity: Bring data and identity to life in a way that meets your needs by securely sharing data between partners, utilizing the integrations we have across the ecosystem, and using our marketing data in flexible ways. Make the most of this holiday shopping season with Experian. Contact us today to get started. Contact us Source Online survey conducted in June, 2024 among n=1,000 U.S. adults 18+. Sample balanced to look like the general population on key demographics (age, gender, household income, ethnicity, and region). Latest posts
Today, Experian is excited to introduce our Offline Graph as a standalone product that clients can license, marking a significant step in our commitment to powering data-driven advertising through connectivity. Offline Graph empowers advertisers and advertising technology companies to build and refine consumer profiles, contributing to data connectivity, more offline audience reach, and improved offline measurement accuracy. As a result of consumers engaging with content across more channels, there are more disparate data points than ever before. When you couple that with ongoing signal loss, the need for a unified identity solution has never been greater. Experian’s Offline Graph offers companies a license of stable offline data points, like name, address, phone number, email, geographic information, date of birth, and additional attributes that provide a complete view of household and individual identities. The Offline Graph integrates known offline identity information from reliable deterministic sources like property ownership records, public records, and marketing data to provide access to all United States consumers and households. How customers can use the Offline Graph A big box retailer fills in the blanks of their existing customer data and builds a database of prospects. A media platform more effectively onboards advertisers’ segments, enabling advertisers to reach more of their customers. A retail brand better understands their customer’s demographic and behavioral make-up, by licensing Offline Graph with Marketing Attributes. A connected TV (CTV) manufacturer increases audience reach and accurately quantifies the campaign impact for their advertising partners. Experian’s Offline Graph is already driving value across industries. Here’s some in-depth client success stories: Fusion92 licenses Offline Graph to help their clients transform their marketing Fusion92 is a marketing partner that fuels business transformation in today’s digital economy and delivers exponential returns for brands. Fusion92 licenses Experian’s Offline Graph to power their strategy: from research and discovery to audience creation, activation, and measurement. With access to our Offline Graph, Fusion92 ensures their clients get the insights, targeting, reach, and measurement they need to achieve their business goals. "At Fusion92, we are always pushing the envelope to develop solutions that lead to success for our clients. Our desire to innovate pushed us to find an industry-leading partner in data and identity. This led to us licensing Experian’s Offline Graph product, which we use to build more complete audience profiles for our clients. In doing so, we help brands target, activate, and measure their marketing campaigns more effectively, leading to superior results.”dave nugent, executive vice president of data and analytics, fusion92 Using Offline Graph to deliver relevant messaging to multiple audience cohorts A leading direct-to-consumer (DTC) company with strong customer relationships built a robust first-party data set, enabling effective customer retention. To attract new customers, they partnered with Experian to access offline identity data from Experian’s Offline Graph. The Offline Graph provides them with the data needed to validate their first-party data and with the keys to unlock new customers. With this data, the DTC company delivered the right message to both sets of consumers: existing customers and new prospects. By integrating Experian’s Offline Graph they broadened their reach, personalized their messaging, and improved their marketing. What sets Experian’s Offline Graph apart from the competition Stability of data: With data from deterministic sources, our Offline Graph ensures that your view of consumers – and your ability to connect with them – is stable over time. Connected digital and offline data: Seamlessly connect offline data with digital identifiers through our Digital Graph, enabling a holistic approach to marketing, while ensuring consumer privacy is prioritized. Tailor made for your use cases: Build the Offline Graph to fit your specific needs, selecting the exact offline identity information required for your campaigns. Expanded consumer insights: Connect more data points to enrich your understanding of consumer demographics and behavior, using Experian’s Marketing Attributes and Audiences data. Offline Graph: Your gateway to consumer connectivity As signals fade, there is a large emphasis on procuring and having accurate consumer data. Experian’s Offline Graph delivers the connectivity and insights necessary to stay ahead. Whether you aim to strengthen your existing data or access entirely new data sets, Experian’s Offline Graph offers a solution tailored to your needs. Transform your data strategy with Experian’s Offline Graph — your gateway to a unified consumer identity solution. Get started today Latest posts