At A Glance
Infillion and Experian collaborate to help advertisers connect with audiences across devices and channels, as cookies and mobile identifiers disappear. By integrating Experian's Digital Graph and Offline Identity Resolution, Infillion strengthens identity connections, improves campaign reach, and enhances audience engagement across CTV, mobile, and web.In our Ask the Expert Series, we interview leaders from our partner organizations who are helping lead their brands to new heights in AdTech. Today’s interview is with Ben Smith, VP of Product, Data Products at Infillion.
Adapting to signal loss
What does the Experian–Infillion integration mean for advertisers looking to reach audiences as signals fade?
As cookies and mobile identifiers disappear, brands need a new way to find and reach their audiences. The Experian integration strengthens Infillion’s XGraph, a cookieless, interoperable identity graph that supports all major ID frameworks, unifying people and households across devices with privacy compliance, by providing a stronger identity foundation with household- and person-level data. This allows us to connect the dots deterministically and compliantly across devices and channels, including connected TV (CTV). The result is better match rates on your first-party data, more scalable reach in cookieless environments, and more effective frequency management across every screen.
Connecting audiences across channels
How does Experian’s Digital Graph strengthen Infillion’s ability to deliver addressable media across channels like CTV and mobile?
Experian strengthens the household spine of XGraph, which means we can accurately connect CTV impressions to the people and devices in that home – then extend those connections to mobile and web. This lets us plan, activate, and measure campaigns at the right level: household for CTV, and person or device for mobile and web. The outcome is smarter reach, less waste from over-frequency, and campaigns that truly work together across channels.
The value of earned attention
Infillion has long championed “guaranteed attention” in advertising. How does that philosophy translate into measurable outcomes for brands?
Our engagement formats, such as TrueX, are based on a simple principle: attention should be earned, not forced. Viewers choose to engage with the ad and complete an action, which means every impression represents real, voluntary attention rather than passive exposure. Because of that, we consistently see stronger completion rates, deeper engagement, and clearer downstream results – like lower acquisition costs, improved on-site behavior, and measurable brand lift.
To take that a step further, we measure attention through UpLift, our real-time brand lift tool. UpLift helps quantify how exposure to a campaign influences awareness, consideration, or purchase intent, providing a more complete picture of how earned attention translates into business impact.
Creative innovation and location insights
Beyond identity resolution, what are some of Infillion’s capabilities, like advanced creative formats or location-based insights, that set you apart in the market?
One key area is location intelligence, which combines privacy-safe geospatial insights with location-based targeting through our proprietary geofencing technology. This allows us to build custom, data-driven campaigns that connect media exposure to real-world outcomes – like store visits and dwell time – measured through Arrival, our in-house footfall attribution product.
We also build custom audiences using a mix of zero-party survey data, first-party location-based segments, and bespoke audience builds aligned to each advertiser’s specific strategy.
Then there’s creative innovation, which is a major differentiator for us. Our high-impact formats go beyond static display, such as interactive video units that let viewers explore products through hotspots or carousels, rich-media ads that feature polls, quizzes, dynamic distance, or gamified elements, and immersive experiences that encourage active participation rather than passive viewing. These creative formats not only capture attention but also generate deeper engagement and stronger performance for a variety of KPIs.
Future ready media strategies
How does Infillion’s ID-agnostic approach help brands future-proof their media strategies amid ongoing privacy and tech changes?
We don’t put all our eggs in one basket. XGraph securely unifies multiple durable identifiers alongside our proprietary TrueX supply to strengthen CTV household reach. This agnostic design allows us to adapt as platforms, regulations, and browsers evolve – so you can preserve reach and measurement capabilities without getting locked into a single ID or losing coverage when the next signal deprecates.
Raising the bar for media accountability
Looking ahead, how is Infillion evolving its platform to meet the next wave of challenges in audience engagement and media accountability?
From an engagement standpoint, we’re expanding our ability to support the full customer journey, offering ad experiences that move seamlessly from awareness to consideration to conversion. That includes smarter creative that adapts to context, intelligent targeting and retargeting informed by real data, and formats designed to drive measurable outcomes rather than just impressions.
When it comes to accountability, we’re ensuring that measurement is both flexible and credible. In addition to our proprietary tools, we partner with leading third-party measurement providers to validate results and give advertisers confidence that their investment is truly performing. Within our DSP, we emphasize full transparency and log-level data access, ensuring advertisers can see exactly what’s happening on every impression.
All of this builds toward the next era of agentic media buying – one enabled by our MCP suite and modular, component-based tools. This evolution brings greater accountability and next-generation audience engagement to an increasingly automated, intelligent media landscape. Our goal is to help brands connect more meaningfully with audiences while holding every impression – and every outcome – to a higher standard of transparency and effectiveness.
Driving impact across the funnel
What is a success story or use cases that demonstrate the impact of the Experian–Infillion integration?
We recently partnered with a national veterans’ organization to raise awareness of its programs for injured or ill veterans and their families. Using the Experian integration, we combined persistent household- and person-level identifiers with cross-device activation to reach veteran and donor audiences more precisely across CTV, display, and rich media. The campaign achieved standout results – industry-leading engagement rates, a 99% video completion rate, and measurable lifts in both brand awareness (3.6 % increase) and donation consideration (13.7% lift). It’s a clear example of how stronger identity and smarter activation can drive meaningful outcomes across the full funnel.
Contact us
FAQs
Identity resolution ensures accurate connections between devices, households, and individuals. Experian’s Offline Identity Resolution and Digital Graph strengthen these connections for improved targeting and consistent measurement across CTV, mobile, and web.
Solutions like Experian’s Digital Graph enable brands to connect first-party data to household and person-level identifiers, ensuring scalable reach and compliant audience targeting legacy signals fade.
Focusing on earned attention (where audiences actively choose to engage) leads to stronger completion rates, improves on-site behavior, and drives measurable increases in brand awareness and consideration.
By linking CTV impressions to households and extending those connections to mobile and web, Experian’s identity solutions ensure campaigns work together seamlessly, reducing over-frequency and improving overall reach.
About our expert
Ben Smith, VP Product, Data Products
Ben Smith leads Infillion’s Data Products organization, delivering identity, audience, and measurement solutions across the platform. Previously, he was CEO and co-founder of Fysical, a location intelligence startup acquired by Infillion in 2019.
About Infillion
Infillion is the first fully composable advertising platform, built to solve the challenges of complexity, fragmentation, and opacity in the digital media ecosystem. With MediaMath at its core, Infillion’s modular approach enables advertisers to seamlessly integrate or independently deploy key components—including demand, data, creative, and supply. This flexibility allows brands, agencies, commerce and retail media networks, and resellers to create tailored, high-performance solutions without the constraints of traditional, all-or-nothing legacy systems.
Latest posts
Identified in The 2021 Digital Advertising Trends Report published by Postclick, marketers are striving to improve and enhance their segmentation and targeting strategies in their digital ad campaigns. Carlos Lopez, SVP of Brand Planning at Digitas Health predicted that in 2021, the challenge will be to overcome the death of third-party cookies and still deliver a personalized advertising experience. It’s fair to say that his prediction will still be impacting marketers past 2021 with the delay of cookie deprecation. These goals along with the constantly changing digital landscape paint a challenging picture for even the most advanced marketers. Marketers can be prepared for the next era of digital marketing by finding the right mix of partners that offer privacy-safe, cookie-free solutions. Smart marketers will employ these solutions and compare these results with data from cookies. The Tapad + Experian Take The Tapad Graph enables brands, agencies, and ad tech platforms to identify and target individuals and households across their digital touchpoints. With this data, they can personalize messages across devices, measure and optimize throughout the customer journey, and then report back on conversions at the individual and household levels. Tapad, now part of Experian, leverages a machine learning algorithm that determines these connections at scale by using probabilistic models with authenticated, privacy-safe, real-time data. There are a myriad of cookieless IDs emerging in the marketplace, and it’s not likely going to be a one size fits all situation. In order to be prepared for the next era of digital marketing, marketers should diversify ID partners and be proactive with testing while the cookie is still around to benchmark against. With Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, we’ve been able to develop connections between traditional digital identifiers (IP Addresses, MAIDs, CTV IDs) and the new wave of cookieless IDs (UID2.0, Panorama ID, ID5 ID) that will be utilized in the future. Here’s an example of what The Tapad Graph and Switchboard looks like at the Household level with various traditional digital identifiers and cookieless IDs. Get in touch
Marketers are under more pressure than ever before to prove ROI and efficiency of marketing activities in relation to business performance. On top of that, there are new privacy regulations and uncertainty around what new technologies will have to be implemented in order to replace the granular level targeting and measurement the industry historically has used third-party cookies for. It’s clear marketers are going to need the right tech stack and partners to continue to prove their team’s efficacy. We recently partnered with Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current state of customer data-driven marketing and surveyed over 300 global marketing decision makers at the brand and agency levels. We found that marketing is facing increased demands today, insights from the study include:Consumers expect brands to deliver engaging experiences across highly fragmented journeys. Seventy-two percent of decision-makers reported that customers demand more relevant, personalized experiences at the time and place of their choosing. Marketing runs on data, but the rules governing customer data usage are changing quickly. More than 70% of study participants stated that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies, fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand. These demands paint a challenging picture. Just as marketers are poised (and tasked) with delivering greater value to their organizations and customers, the ground rules are changing and threatening their ability to deliver. Indeed, 62% of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have either a “Significant” (40%) or “Critical” (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years. Effective identity resolution can help brands prepare for data deprecation challenges Marketers face a daunting landscape, but they can leverage the data, technology, and processes that comprise identity resolution to address business objectives, combat ecosystem complexity, and future-proof customer engagement efforts. By utilizing identity resolution, marketers will be able to match and connect multiple identifiers across devices and touchpoints. This allows for a cohesive, omnichannel view that enables brands to continue to deliver personalized and contextually relevant messages throughout the customer journey and without the use of cookies. The identity graph is the underlying infrastructure that defines connections between the numerous, fluid, and disparate identifiers created during moments of consumer engagement, turning disparate signals into addressable and actionable steps. These connections enable brands to bolster their ability to gain deeper customer insights and power audience building, attribution, and connected measurement. Identity resolution encompasses a wide range of capabilities that support an equally diverse set of marketing use cases. These include the targeting, personalization, and measurement of both known and pseudonymous audiences in the offline and digital worlds, which enables marketers to improve customer data management, drive more effective personalization, and gain insights and efficiencies through measurement across touchpoints. By taking the time to vet the privacy procedures and data collection processes of identity solutions you can reduce your regulatory risk and maintain customer trust. In an open-ended survey response, a marketer shared, “We’ve found that users are willing to volunteer data when they understand what it’s being used for and are asked for clear consent.” Finding the right partners to help navigate the changes The scramble to find an alternative to third-party cookies has slowed down since Google announced they will be delaying their cookie removal until late 2023. However, this gives marketers a unique opportunity to take advantage of the additional time and feel more prepared and confident in their solutions. With the delay, marketers can now test ID solutions and compare apples to apples with data from the third-party cookie while it’s still active and addressable. Test and find a solution that works now, so there are no surprises once cookies have finally made their way out the door in 2023. At Tapad, a part of Experian, we’ve developed a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for the myriad of cookieless identifiers emerging in the market. As a new module in the Tapad Graph, Switchboard will connect traditional digital identifiers to cookieless IDs to support the entire ad ecosystem with privacy-safe future-proof identity resolution. Get in touch
Email hashing was originally intended to be used as an email security feature that has ended up being a very powerful marketing tool. A hashed email is a cryptographic function that changes an email address to a random code which can be used as an anonymous customer identifier. This code is privacy-safe and cannot be traced back to the customer’s email address. However, this hashed email can function like a digital passport that traces every behavior and action a customer takes when logged into an account that is authenticated with an email, making hashed emails a goldmine for customer data. Today emails are used across traditional publishers and within the CTV ecosystem; tying them to more consumer touch points than ever before. Why the emphasis now? Cookies are on their way out the door and have been the primary way that many marketers have tracked their existing and potential customers. In order to replace this granular level of data, marketers are likely going to need multiple solutions. With so many cookieless solutions and IDs appearing in the marketplace, the mapping of the customer journey is bound to be fragmented. Relying on first-party data, such as hashed email, is just one way to reduce that fragmentation; as it can serve as an authenticated starting point for cross-device identity resolution that can be leveraged for targeting, personalization and measurement. How can Tapad + Experian help? Tapad + Experian's Hashed Email Onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers through high precision probabilistic identity. By onboarding hashed emails and incorporating them within your Tapad Graph file you can: Build a more holistic view of individuals and households and their relationship to email addresses in your first-party data set Leverage these relationships for increased cross-device scale for targeting Employ personalization tactics at the household or individual level across devices Create new audience segments and look-alike models for cross-channel activation Design more inclusive measurement and attribution for customer journey mapping Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email onboarding product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view, combined with the attributes you need, in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get in touch