Key takeaways:
- Strong partnerships align audiences, capabilities, and commercial goals, with the flexibility to add or change partners as needs shift.
- Interoperable identity creates companies and environments, with trust and governance providing clarity around how data and identity are used.
- Consumer intelligence creates more value when enrichment, planning, activation, curation, and measurement work together within the systems marketers already use.
- Better decisioning helps marketers navigate an abundance of data and find what’s relevant to their objectives, with AI helping support discovery and selection.
AdTech has built a range of technology for understanding audiences, resolving identity, activating media, and measuring performance. The opportunity now is to make those capabilities work together.
Data sits in different systems, identity changes between environments, and campaigns move across platforms and companies before anyone can tie media activity back to an outcome. Each capability serves a purpose. Greater interoperability creates a more consistent path from planning through measurement.
Interoperability brings those capabilities into alignment across systems, environments, and companies. For brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms, that can mean less complexity and greater continuity from one stage of the advertising workflow to the next.
Partnerships are becoming part of the operating model
Strong AdTech partnerships start by finding where companies fit together, from the audiences they serve to the capabilities and commercial goals they share.
That alignment creates room to build something more valuable together, including more relevant ad experiences that draw on what each company does best. It also creates optionality. Companies can bring in new partners or capabilities as needs change without rebuilding the strategy from the ground up. This is what turns a partnership into part of the operating model.
Companies align around shared goals, build on each other’s strengths, and create a structure that can adapt as the advertising ecosystem changes.
Connected advertising needs identity that works across companies
Consistent identity gives companies a shared foundation across planning, activation, and measurement, even when those activities happen across different platforms and environments.
Interoperable identity connects people, households, devices, data, media exposure, and outcomes across those environments without requiring every company to use the same technology stack.
That interoperability also requires trust. As identity moves across companies and environments, each participant needs clarity around how data and identity are used. Strong governance creates that clarity and gives companies a more reliable foundation for working together.
AI-powered identity resolution can interpret changing digital signals and connect them with more stable identity information, creating a more consistent view across environments. With AI increasingly informing advertising decisions, the quality of the data, identity, and governance behind those systems will shape the quality of their decisions.
Consumer intelligence should meet marketers where decisions happen
Consumer intelligence creates more value when it becomes part of the systems marketers already use to make decisions. Bringing enrichment, audience planning, activation, curation, and measurement closer together gives marketers a clearer path from understanding people to putting that understanding to work.
That consolidation matters. When the same system carries more of the workflow, marketers can enrich their data, build and activate audiences, curate media, and measure outcomes with greater consistency. The intelligence gained from measurement can then inform the decisions that come next. AI makes those connections even more valuable.
When AI supports audience selection, media choices, and measurement, reliable consumer intelligence across the workflow gives it the context needed to make informed decisions.
Better decisioning turns more data into value
AdTech has made huge amounts of data accessible, which creates a new challenge: helping marketers decide what to use. Making thousands of audiences available solved the access problem. But the next question is how marketers determine which options fit a particular objective.
AdTech companies can make that abundance easier to navigate by helping marketers find, evaluate, and apply relevant data within the systems they already use. AI can help interpret large catalogs and surface useful options, but those recommendations still depend on accurate data, consistent identity, and enough context to inform the decision.
What this shift means for AdTech
Interoperability gives AdTech a way to bring together what the industry has already built. Partnerships align companies, identity creates continuity across environments, consumer intelligence turns data into context, and better decisioning helps marketers find what matters for the objective at hand.
Together, those capabilities create an ecosystem where specialized companies and technologies can work together without passing complexity on to the customer. As more advertising decisions become AI-assisted, that connectivity becomes even more important.
AdTech has spent years building the pieces. Now the focus is removing the seams between them.
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About the author
Ali Mack
VP, AdTech Sales
Ali Mack leads Experian’s AdTech business, overseeing global revenue across the company’s expansive tech and media portfolio. With over a decade of experience in digital and TV advertising, Ali drives strategic growth by aligning sales, customer success, and solutions teams to deliver impactful outcomes for clients and partners.
She has successfully guided teams through two major acquisitions, integrating sales organizations and product portfolios into unified go-to-market strategies. Under her leadership, Experian has consistently exceeded revenue targets while fostering collaborative, results-driven teams and mentoring emerging leaders. Working closely with finance, product, and marketing, Ali develops strategies that support a diverse ecosystem of publishers, brands, and technology partners, positioning Experian at the forefront of data-driven advertising and identity resolution.
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Advertisers continue to increase their spending across addressable TV, connected TV (CTV), and digital. According to IAB’s “2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook” report, digital video ad spending is expected to increase by 26% to $49.2 billion in 2022. Understanding who consumers are and how to best reach them in their preferred channel is becoming more complex. Damian Amitin and Colleen Dawe discuss how a seamless identity strategy can address the complexity of the emerging TV space. The evolution of identity resolution Around ten years ago, the idea of digital “identity resolution” or “Device Graphs” was born. This idea connected cookies and MAIDs to understand when many IDs were the same person or household. In more recent years, our industry began to connect that initial understanding to the CTV ecosystem. But, a large part of the TV ecosystem existed in silos, like first and third-party audience data, and the growing advanced TV market. The goal of identity resolution has always been to understand the consumer better. To achieve more accurate targeting and measurement in the CTV ecosystem, we must incorporate the following: What we know about the household and consumer from an ID perspective Who the consumer is as it relates to audience data, as well as the wealth of first-party data in the advanced TV space We know the cookie is a flawed way to collect data. While Google delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies, there are other challenges that we face right now. Such as the glaring gap in Safari traffic and the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) turning to “opt-in.” Understanding consumer behavior across devices and platforms continues to challenge marketers and publishers. These challenges are creating the need to find more stable identifiers. Though the cookie remains valuable, it has an uncertain future. This has led advertisers to place bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. The overlap in addressable and CTV data leads to fragmentation Personally identifiable information (PII) makes up the majority of addressable TV households’ data. Part of the attraction to CTV is that their IDs remain universal, persistent, and stable. Analysts project that CTV ad spending will hit $23B in 2023. Consumers now have an average of 4.7 streaming subscriptions per household. It’s no surprise then, that Disney+, HBO, and Netflix released or announced ad-supported tiers. Addressable TV and CTV are often thought of as distinct markets across the industry. But, in the context of identity, we should look at them through the same lens. Millions of households still consume TV and video content via a set-top box or through apps on CTVs. This is in addition to what they consume on their laptops, tablets, and phones. Of the top 11 cable and satellite providers, 65 million U.S. households still have a box in their homes. On the other hand, approximately 96 million U.S. households have at least one or more Smart TVs and streaming services. With about 126 million total U.S. TV households, that’s a lot of overlap. There are still significant numbers of both addressable and CTV homes. How can we address fragmented TV consumption? Through a holistic and comprehensive approach to identity. An approach that captures addressable TV, CTV, and digital identifiers. An approach that captures all audience attributes inside of a single identity graph. This is the ideal approach for publishers, AdTech vendors, and brands. Discover how to unlock holistic identity How can we achieve a holistic identity? Through a three-pillared approach: First-party data onboarding Digital identifiers Consumer data First-party data onboarding Bringing offline data from a brand’s consumers is very valuable due to the quality of the data. Because the data is being collected right from the source, you know it’s accurate. It provides the foundation you can build your identity strategy from. Digital identifiers Once you create a foundation with first-party data, you need to connect it. Either with an internal or licensed digital ID graph. Then you can understand the connections between all devices within the household. Consumer data After you know which devices tie to a single consumer, you’ll want to act on that knowledge. The next step is to partner with a data provider that can help you understand your consumers. Establishing this partnership will help improve targeting, measurement, and the customer experience. To achieve a well-rounded customer view tomorrow, we need to start today The three-pillared approach bridges the gap between the offline and online worlds. This provides a well-rounded view of customers and audiences. However, the ability to tie these aspects of identity together still presents several challenges. To achieve the three-pillared approach today, you need to use many vendors and fragmented data sources. Often with conflicting data. As we look forward, the tools to do this are becoming more advanced and unified. The players in our ecosystem should adopt a seamless identity strategy. One that provides a privacy-safe yet full-picture solution. That means capturing and unifying all devices within a household. While also understanding the consumer behaviors and profiles behind those devices. Keep up with your customers and their data Once we create an informed identity strategy, we can begin to understand the makeup of each household and the individuals within. In this new world, personalizing the experience for an audience is key. Where do they prefer to spend their time? What type of content are they most engaged in? Only then can we as an industry provide an optimal experience for each consumer. All while driving greater ROI for advertisers and publishers. Are you ready to know more about your customers than ever before? Let’s get to work together to achieve your marketing goals. Contact us to learn how we can connect the complex dots of identity resolution. About our experts Damian Amitin, VP of Enterprise Partnerships, Experian Marketing Services Damian Amitin is the VP of Enterprise Partnerships and joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. Damian is a senior sales and partnerships executive, specializing in the identity resolution and marketing data ecosystem. Damian helps brands, publishers, and technology vendors enable enhanced ID resolution through The Experian/Tapad platform to attain a 360 view of the customer across targeting analytics, attribution, and personalization. Colleen Dawe, Senior Account Executive, Experian Marketing Services Colleen Dawe is a Senior Account Executive on the Advanced TV Team within Experian Marketing Services. With 15 years of experience working within the television ecosystem, Colleen works with clients to bring the value and expertise of Experian to support their objectives in the areas of data, identity, activation, and measurement. Get in touch
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