In this article…
Summer may be vacation season for consumers, but it’s go time for marketers. Between holiday weekends, travel season, and changing shopping habits, the pressure is on to deliver campaigns that land and convert.
If you’re feeling behind, you’re not alone. Many marketers face the same challenge every year: How do you actually use the customer data you have to fuel high-impact, seasonal marketing? And how do you ensure your brand shows up in front of the right people in the right place before the competition beats you to it?
That’s where Experian comes in. With Experian’s advanced Audience solutions, you can get ahead of the trends, connect with vacation-ready shoppers, and optimize performance across digital, TV, and retail media using customer data for seasonal marketing.
Capitalize on vacation excitement to drive sales and growth
Summer travel often triggers a surge in pre-trip spending. Surveys show that 82% of consumers plan to travel this summer, and according to Fortune, today’s travelers spend thousands of dollars on things like luggage, apparel, and recreation gear before they even leave their homes!
But while consumer demand is heating up, so are the challenges. Marketers are navigating a turbulent economic environment shaped by shifting demand curves, tighter budgets, the rising cost of goods, and supply chain disruptions caused by newly imposed tariffs. These pressures are forcing teams to rethink everything from product positioning to pricing strategies.
In this climate, it’s more important than ever to maximize performance, reduce waste, and stay laser-focused on reaching high-intent audiences likely to convert. Using customer data for seasonal marketing helps brands predict and capture demand with precise, relevant targeting. Whether your customers are planning a trip to the beach or hiking the Rockies, timely messaging and audience alignment can drive engagement and conversion.
Experian Audiences power effective audience strategies
But even the most compelling campaigns can fall flat if you’re working with incomplete data, outdated segments, or generic targeting. Consumer data providers like Experian can help you fix that.
Our Audience solutions help you go beyond assumptions and truly understand who your shoppers are, what they’re planning, and how they behave, so you’re ready to get in front of their summer plans.
Six steps to creating a successful seasonal marketing campaign
When you’re ready to turn summer intent into strategy, Experian Audience solutions help you translate vacation-driven behaviors into high-performing campaigns. Each product in the Experian Audience suite supports a specific stage in seasonal marketing planning and execution.
1. Define your goals
Before diving into channels and creatives, get clear on your customer database marketing goals. Are you trying to increase online purchases? Drive in-store traffic? Expand brand awareness?
Use Syndicated Audiences to set fast, focused goals. If you’re short on time, Experian’s 2,400+ Syndicated Audiences give you a head start. These pre-built, behavior-based segments — from luxury travelers to seasonal sports enthusiasts — help you quickly identify who to target, where they spend time, and how to message to them.
With segments ready to plug into 30+ activation platforms, you can ensure quick, confident activation.
2. Decide what data you need and which audiences to target
Using customer data for seasonal marketing means mapping behavior to intent. This core tactic in customer database marketing can help you drive deeper engagement. Our data solutions simplify the process, whether you’re starting with limited data or already know your best customers.
- If you’re starting with a list, Enrichment can append lifestyle, income, and travel preference data to help you understand what motivates your existing customers.
- If you don’t have a list, Marketing Attributes gives you full control when building new audiences or lookalikes based on relevant seasonal traits like beach vacationers or frequent CTV watchers.
3. Identify key holidays and events
Summer is full of shopping triggers: Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and countless local and regional events. However, not every customer behaves the same way.
Use Enrichment to understand when your customers are most likely to act. By comparing your first-party data to broader market segments, you can time promotions more strategically. For instance, enrichment might reveal that outdoor gear buyers convert in early June, while luxury travelers plan closer to July.
4. Activate across digital, TV, and retail media
Summer shoppers don’t stick to one screen. They’re streaming TV, reading travel blogs, browsing retail apps, and catching up on email — often from a beach chair or airplane seat. That’s why omnichannel delivery is a must, and it’s where consumer data vendors like Experian can help you reach your audience across channels with targeted messaging for key holidays and events:
- Syndicated Audiences simplifies omnichannel activation with built-in integrations to 30+ leading activation platforms. These pre-mapped segments let you deliver consistent messaging across the places where your audience is most engaged.
- Looking for privacy-forward reach? Contextually-Indexed Audiences are segments built by linking real-world behavioral data to the types of content those audiences typically consume online, allowing you to activate based on content instead of identity while offering a more contextually relevant experience. Using customer data for seasonal marketing, Experian maps real audience segments across web and app environments — like national park guides and travel blogs — for ID-free precision targeting in a cookieless environment.
5. Track and evaluate performance
Don’t wait until the end of the campaign to make changes. Experian’s measurement tools help you track performance in real time, so you can optimize early and often.
Measure how well specific audiences — enriched, syndicated, or contextual — are performing across platforms and use those insights to shift spend toward top performers.
6. Optimize and refine your strategy
After the season ends, it’s time to take what you’ve learned and build smarter for the next push.
Use Outcomes to analyze:
- Who converted
- Which segments underperformed
- How your customer base compares to the broader market
- How your audience evolved
- Which campaigns drove meaningful adoption
These insights can then inform your next round of audience building, so whether it’s back-to-school or a holiday, you’re already ahead.
Example 1: The beach vacation shopper
To illustrate Experian’s Audience solutions at work, let’s say a high-end swimsuit brand wants to reach women over 30 planning beach vacations to Florida, Hawaii, or Mexico. However, their CRM only includes basic transaction and purchase details and offers little insight into who their customers are.
Audience solution: Enrichment
Using Experian’s Enrichment solution, the brand could layer on lifestyle, income, and travel preference data to turn shallow profiles into rich audience segments.
With a deeper understanding of their shoppers, the brand could develop a targeted messaging strategy by destination, build high-performing lookalike audiences, and confidently activate across channels.
Example 2: The European traveler
As another example, suppose a footwear brand wants to reach millennial travelers heading to Europe between May and August. They specialize in stylish, comfortable walking shoes that are ideal for travel but lack the technical in-house resources to build custom segments.
Audience solution: Syndicated Audiences
Using our Syndicated Audiences, the brand could easily tap into pre-built segments tied to leisure travelers, international shoppers, and comfort-focused footwear buyers. With plug-and-play access to over 2,400 verified audience segments, the brand could quickly layer this targeting into their programmatic and paid social campaigns without requiring custom development.
And with fast speed-to-market and improved message relevance, the brand could launch cross-channel campaigns just in time for peak summer travel planning.
Example 3: The outdoorsman
Consider a camping tent company that wants to reach families planning summer trips to national parks, campgrounds, or RV resorts. They don’t have much first-party data to work with, but they know their audience is online, researching their next adventure.
Audience solution: Contextually-Indexed Audiences
With Experian’s Contextually-Indexed Audiences, the brand could target people actively reading content about outdoor travel (like hiking tips, campground reviews, or road trip itineraries) without relying on cookies or IDs. They’d be able to activate contextually relevant audiences mapped to sites that outdoor enthusiasts frequent and drive site traffic with strong click-through rates.
Example 4: Big-box retailer launching summer gear
Imagine a national retailer preparing to promote summer essentials like patio furniture, grills, fitness gear, and travel accessories. Their goal is to build predictive models for their summer product demand and reach new customers most likely to buy before they even search.
Audience solution: Marketing Attributes
With Experian’s Marketing Attributes, the retailer could license over 5,000 lifestyle, demographic, and behavioral variables to enrich internal models and uncover high-indexing consumer groups, such as outdoor entertainers or health-conscious families.
This data-powered insight would help them predict demand and identify audience segments worth testing across media channels. The team could find new, qualified segments ideal for email and CTV activation and get a head start on the season, eventually increasing ROI on their summer campaign spend.
Talk to Experian about your summer campaigns today
Using customer data for marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming, especially when you have access to a trusted consumer data provider and plug-and-play audience tools for every stage of the funnel.
Whether you’re working with a robust CRM or starting fresh, consumer data vendors like Experian can help you reach the right audiences with speed, accuracy, and confidence. Our advanced tools are designed for both advanced marketers and teams just beginning to explore consumer database marketing. No matter your goals, Experian is here to help you build an audience strategy that performs.
Contact us today
Latest posts
Originally appeared in AdExchanger Google’s decision not to deprecate cookies in the Chrome browser after all caused a stir across the industry. Companies invested heavily in developing solutions aligned with the Privacy Sandbox as a survival tactic for the post-cookie landscape. At first glance, Google’s about-face may appear to undercut those efforts. It’s easy, and perhaps even satisfying for some – but inaccurate – to say “all that effort was for nothing.” Given Chrome’s dominance among browsers, AdTech companies had no choice but to prepare for “what if” scenarios. The same goes for cookie deprecation. Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies would have removed a mechanism that has been a cornerstone of addressability for the past 15 years. To be clear, those efforts have not been wasted. They spurred innovation across the AdTech landscape, driving progress in privacy-first targeting, alternative identifiers, supply-path data activation, and real-time data enrichment – all of which will pay dividends for years to come. Whether born directly from Privacy Sandbox participation or inspired by the broader trend toward privacy reform, industry-wide preparation for cookie loss and browser disruption has yielded tangible benefits. Pressure from Google, Apple, and evolving regulations served as a catalyst for modernization that could shape the next decade of advertising technology. An industry anchored in product innovation AdTech is a fundamentally product-driven industry defined by short innovation cycles and the imperative to build and test rapidly. This DNA enables companies to stay resilient, evolve and deliver innovation. Change is good. Disruption can be even better – but only for those who embrace it. Google’s evolving stance on cookies and Privacy Sandbox doesn’t negate what’s been learned. If anything, it underscores the need to keep innovating. The next wave of disruption is likely right around the corner. The payoff While some may argue that the time and effort spent preparing for cookie loss was wasted, those efforts have functioned as a forcing mechanism for several innovations in data activation. Supply-side data activation and optimization, aka “curation,” is an alternative to the traditional approach to data activation. Unlike the traditional data management platform (DMP) to demand-side platform (DSP) activation flow, curation allows buyers to utilize supply-path data more directly. The upshot? Improved performance and pricing for media agencies and brand advertisers. As curation continues to evolve, it’s poised to play a central role in how advertisers and publishers transact. Real-time data enrichment is another area that has benefited from this period of accelerated innovation. Many companies were compelled to improve their tech stacks to align with Sandbox protocols. These updates, particularly in real-time data enrichment capabilities, are now laying the groundwork for future data activation strategies across both the buy and sell-sides. Exiting out of tunnel vision Over the past five years, the AdTech industry has invested deeply in planning for a future without cookies. Still those investments have been well worth it. While cookies are not going away, the broader deprecation of signal continues. The work that was done to prepare will inevitably inform the next evolution of our industry. Contact us Latest posts
Marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver personalized, high-performing campaigns—while navigating tighter budgets, shifting privacy expectations, and fragmented tech stacks. Despite an explosion of tools and data sources, the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed. Every great campaign still starts with a simple question: Who are we trying to reach? The answer depends on how well you understand your customers. Increasingly, that understanding is hampered by data silos, inconsistent identity signals, and disconnected workflows between planning, activation, and measurement. When those pieces don’t align, it leads to inefficient spending, incomplete insights, and missed opportunities. To move forward, marketers need more than better tools—they need a more connected approach. Start with a complete view of the customer The foundation of effective marketing is understanding your audience—not just who they are, but what they care about and how to reach them across devices and platforms. That starts with building a complete customer profile. For many marketers, this means linking persistent offline data—such as name and address—with fresh digital signals like device IDs and online behaviors. When combined, these elements provide a high-fidelity view of the customer that can be enriched with attributes like demographics, purchase behavior, and lifestyle interests. This kind of profile doesn’t just help you understand people—it helps you build audience segments that actually perform. Whether you’re working with your own CRM data or third-party sources, the ability to create addressable segments that are both accurate and scalable is what separates good campaigns from great ones. 🛳️ That’s exactly what MMGY did for Windstar Cruises. By layering first-party data with behavioral and demographic insights, they built custom audiences that more than doubled campaign benchmarks. 🎮 Gaming platform Unity tapped into Experian audiences to understand player behaviors across web, mobile, and connected TV (CTV). These insights helped their advertisers reach gaming audiences more effectively—tailoring creative and delivery to real-world preferences, not assumptions. Activate with precision, not just volume Knowing your audience is only half the battle. The next challenge is reaching them—consistently and efficiently—across multiple channels. This is where fragmentation can creep back in. All too often, marketers build audiences in one system, but activate in another, causing data loss and targeting mismatches. A more connected strategy uses the same identity and audience spine across planning and activation, reducing signal loss and improving accuracy. 👉 Curated private marketplaces (PMPs), for example, allow marketers to match high-quality audiences with premium inventory in a targeted, transparent, and efficient way. These deals let marketers align their spending with their goals—whether that’s lowering cost-per-acquisition or boosting reach in a key vertical. Performance results are bearing this out: PMG By using Audigent’s curated PMP approach in combination with Experian audience data, they delivered campaigns that were 44% more cost-efficient across CTV. Boiron For Boiron, a homeopathic brand, using curated media buying reduced data costs by 30% and beat CPA goals for both video and display by more than 40%. Index Exchange Publishers benefit, too. When Index Exchange included Audigent-curated inventory in their PMPs, they saw an average 70% revenue lift for mobile and a 13% lift for CTV. When identity, audience, and inventory are aligned, everyone benefits—marketers, publishers, and consumers. Measure what matters Too often, measurement is treated as an afterthought. But in a connected campaign, it’s built in from the beginning. By using consistent identity across planning, activation, and measurement, marketers can connect ad exposure to real-world outcomes—whether that’s an online conversion, an in-store visit, or a new customer relationship. This kind of closed-loop measurement turns marketing into a learning engine. You don’t just see what happened—you understand why it happened and can use that information to improve the next campaign. 🛳️ In the case of Windstar Cruises, MMGY used Experian identity to precisely measure how digital ad exposures translated into bookings. That kind of visibility gives marketers more than a report card. It gives them the feedback they need to optimize smarter next time—and prove ROI every time. The future is connected To meet today’s demands, marketers need a new way of working—one that starts with a complete understanding of the customer, builds addressable audiences on a strong identity foundation, activates them precisely across channels, and measures impact in real time. The marketers embracing this approach are already seeing results: stronger performance, more efficient spending, and deeper insights that power what comes next. The future won’t be built on more tools—it will be built on more connection. Connect with us Latest posts
Curation — the intelligent packaging of data and inventory actionable in a private marketplace deal — can no longer be considered a trend or buzzword. With over 66% of all open exchange – representing $100 billion in annual spend – being transacted through private marketplace deals (PMPs), curation is a key part of how data and identity are addressed and actioned in programmatic media. Programmatic advertising is certainly known for big shifts, but as shared by Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale, “Curation will be bigger than header bidding and as big as programmatic or real-time bidding (RTB) – that’s our bet.” And we agree. But why has curation become a critical component of brands and media agencies\’ digital advertising strategies? Put simply, the math. Case study after case study empirically shows curation performs well for both the buy and sell-sides. For media agencies and brands, curation consistently shows four main benefits: Significant cost efficiencies Buying curated PMPs shows significant cost efficiencies when compared to buying data from the buy-side alone. Strong performance Data-enriched, curated PMPs can be optimized through the supply path, unlike a data management platform (DMP) segment, which leads to strong performance. Futureproofs media buying When data is curated through the supply path, it does not need to rely on legacy identifiers (like cookies), and the door is open to robust, next-gen addressability which better futureproofs media buying opportunities. Value-added insights Curation comes with robust log-level data that can be used for value-added data science including analytics, insights, reporting, and attribution – all critical in a world where addressability and identity resolution are becoming even more challenging. Curation introduced efficiency into homeopathic brand Boiron’s media buys, reducing the brand’s data costs by 30%, which enabled the brand to reinvest the same budget in brand awareness goals. Curation not only met but also exceeded the CPA for display by 82% and for video by 41%. “Audigent has been a top 5 performer in terms of CPA during our testing, helping our teams deliver 44% more efficient spend for brands across CTV campaigns.\”Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at agency PMG A big boost for addressability Legacy identity signals are changing. Whether it’s by browser, device, or platform, both buy-side and sell-side platforms need strong identity signals to reach their intended audiences, and this has become harder than ever before. Curation, with its real-time data connection and enrichment capabilities, solves signal loss challenges by directly connecting to the supply path and using a broader spectrum of identity solutions to boost addressability. Curation allows platforms to target first-party, third-party, contextual, indexed and modeled audiences. This alleviates the dependence on any one identifier and boosts the relevant bidding opportunities for brands and media agencies to target audiences. Not all curation is created equally As with any hot innovation, AdTech is notorious for companies jumping on the bandwagon of the largest trends. Curation is no different, with seemingly everyone now claiming to be a “curator.” As the industry works to define what is and isn’t “curation,\” we are uniquely positioned to define this as Audigent has pioneered curation for seven years and is the industry leader. The definition of curation is the intelligent packaging and optimization of data curated against the inventory supply path. There are three definitional elements to any curation product: Unique audience data Curation must include first-party, third-party, contextual, indexed and/or modeled data. Robust SSP integration To apply data in real-time to the inventory supply path, a curator must have deep partnerships and integrations that enable the combination of data and inventory into a single package. Optimization The whole point of curating data against the supply path is that it opens the door for robust real-time optimization to drive performance. If the solution ticks all three boxes, then brands and agencies should test curation and gauge its results firsthand. Curation done right drives results for brands, agencies, and publishers When done well, curation improves media buying efficiency and performance for brands and agencies. Importantly, it also drives results for publishers and content creators. Advertisers realize average data segment savings of 36-81% when using PMPs over the open exchange (Internal data) Advertisers see 10-70% lower CPC, 1.5x-3.0x higher CTR, and 10-30% higher video completion rate when using data-enriched PMPs over the open exchange (Internal data) When including their inventory in curated PMPs, publishers see an average 70% revenue uplift for mobile and 13% for connected TV (CTV) Beyond voting with budgets, media agencies and brands are also weighing in on the curation conversation: “Our Conditions Marketplace strategies have driven a 48% improvement in eCPM and a 26% improvement in CPA across our pharma client portfolio as of May 2024. For one client, we saw ROAS improve by 58% compared to their overall omnichannel performance while maintaining quality. These results aren’t outliers—they’re proof that curation is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have for marketers who want performance, precision, and scale working in lockstep.”Amanda DeVito, Butler/Till Industry-leading curation with Experian Tapping into an end-to-end solution that enables marketers to understand and reach their desired customers across channels through curation is a win-win for all parties. In the past three years, Experian and curation company Audigent have delivered a range of industry-leading innovations together, including the integration of Experian data into Audigent’s PMPs. As one company now, Experian\’s unique identity and data capabilities amplify how curation activates on the buy-side at scale, setting a new standard for audience targeting with added benefits like audience customization and flexible activation through Audigent’s PMPs or demand-side platforms. Are you headed to Cannes Lions? We’d love to discuss how curation through Experian can help you reach your target audiences more efficiently and accurately. Book a meeting Latest posts