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.
Latest posts
The concept of identity resolution has emerged over the years as a strategic imperative among marketers and technology vendors. A report by Forrester contends that accurately establishing and maintaining customer identity is one of the most perplexing challenges facing marketers today. Customers have footprints in the offline and online worlds and tend to seamlessly transition across various channels and devices – presenting a unique challenge to truly understand who they are. But the ability to stitch these disparate components of information together means marketers can make better decisions and have more meaningful interactions with their customers. And for customers, this means an experience with personalized advertising content more likely to resonate with them. Why should marketers prioritize identity? The ability to accurately identify customers is the most basic prerequisite for marketing analytics, orchestration and execution. As such, it is becoming increasingly important for brands and marketers planning to link together disparate systems of audience insights and engagement to foster a more seamless and personalized omnichannel customer experience. For example, if an advertiser can identify a customer’s interests, as well as how that person prefers to consume information, then the advertiser can create and deliver messaging that will resonate with the customer. However, like most competitive differentiators, the mission critical components to accurately determine an identity reside within the suite of identity management tools at the marketers’ disposal and the expertise required for proper execution – a struggle for most marketers. But when properly implemented, a comprehensive customer identity strategy can be among a brand or marketer’s most valuable and proprietary assets. Where to begin with identity resolution? With the convergence of CRM platform data, cross-channel online touchpoints, offline record linkage management, probabilistic cross-device graphs, and data onboarding—evolving from point solutions to unified platforms—marketers are faced with an increasingly complex set of challenges in addressing and solving for customer identity management. To properly implement from the get go, and to avoid having to bolt on disparate technologies down the road, emerging industry trends and success stories suggest marketers need a neutral technology service provider that can provide each of these solutions via a single, unified platform. A vendor that can build a solid identity management foundation comprised of omni-channel targeting and attribution, cross-device resolution, online-offline linkage management, and data onboarding form the nexus of a cohesive identity strategy, built to last. Experian helps connect consumer identity As a trusted name in data and information services for more than 40 years, we are committed to privacy by design and the responsible usage and security of data. Whether you’re a brand, agency, or publisher, Experian has the wide-ranging toolset to help you put people at the heart of your business and make better marketing decisions. By harnessing the power of the sum of these parts, fusing both offline and online identifiers and attributes, Experian has established a leadership position in identity management. If you’re ready to begin building your identity foundation, contact us and get started today! Learn more about why identity matters to marketers and consumers, here! Contact us today
Partnership Yields Increased Match and Connectivity Rate Through Tapad Graph, acquired by Experian March 27, 2018 — New York, N.Y. — Tapad, part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer and today announced the impactful results of its strategic partnership with Flashtalking, the leading global independent platform for ad delivery, unification and insights. Flashtalking is one of Tapad’s most engaged partners, using the Tapad Graph to unify cross-device engagement and identity-driven consumer behaviors for attribution modeling. The company leverages a unique identifier that, in conjunction with Tapad’s Graph, provides robust multi-touch attribution solution for its clients. This partnership has resulted in above-industry match and bridge rates for Flashtalking and its customers. Overall, the Tapad Graph yielded a 71 percent match rate with 41 percent of converters engaging on multiple devices, highlighting the importance of cross-device measurement. Tapad’s identity solutions provide Flashtalking with a more holistic view of global engagement. Flashtalking marries ad server log file data with the Tapad Graph to connect all interactions in the consumer journey. This enables Flashtalking to provide more accurate and impactful cross-device attribution, which ultimately enables better optimization. These achievements have led to recognition of Tapad and Flashtalking’s work by the I-COM Global Forum for Marketing, Data and Measurement. “Tapad allows us to understand user engagement across devices and platforms at both the household or individual user level, which is extremely beneficial when providing marketers with true path to conversion and attribution,” said Steve Latham, global head of analytics at Flashtalking. “Since our relationship began, we’ve successfully leveraged Tapad data to provide more accurate, actionable insights that have helped numerous brands achieve substantial gains in media effectiveness.” Flashtalking client Michael Lamontagne, SVP of analytics and CRM at 22squared says “We are big believers in using cross-device insights to improve our campaigns. Flashtalking has been a strategic partner in the pursuit of that goal. By incorporating the Tapad Graph, Flashtalking delivers powerful insights into user engagement and media attribution across browsers and devices. Of equal importance, their bundled solution makes it easy and efficient, saving our team countless hours of busy work.” Contact us today
The Tapad Device Graph™ Complements Freckle’s IoT Capabilities to Extend Scale and Precision of Audience Data New York, NY — December 6, 2017 — Tapad, part of Experian, is the leader in cross-device marketing technology and Freckle IoT, the global leader in multi-touch, offline attribution, today announced they are partnering to provide brands with a holistic and insightful view of their customers, in predefined locations in all global markets. Starting today Freckle IoT will be leveraging the Tapad Device Graph™ to supplement the company’s data set to offer brands more granular attribution data. Consumer’s online behavior is becoming more and more complex, with the average consumer owning three or more devices and 35 percent of consumers converting on a different device from the one on which they started their research. These interactions become even more complicated when considering how online interactions and media impact offline sales. The collaboration between Tapad and Freckle, which combines Freckle IoT’s persistent location data with Tapad’s proprietary cross-device technology, is an important step in empowering brands with the information they need to better understand how digital media, consumed across multiple devices, is impacting offline attribution. Using its opt-in, first-party data, Freckle IoT helps brands measure the effectiveness of their advertising by independently matching media spend to in-store visits. Tapad’s technology extends Freckle’s data-set by allowing brands to access additional deterministic and probabilistic data, at scale and across all devices, to analyze consumer behavior ahead of in-store purchase. “Combining our technology with Tapad’s identity-driven solutions was a natural fit for our business,” said Neil Sweeney, founder and CEO at Freckle IoT. “With our unbiased, agnostic measurement and Tapad’s precise and privacy-safe data set, we knew this partnership would be a strong complement to providing more effective results for the needs of our brand partners.” For more information on Freckle IoT’s measurement offerings, please visit www.freckleiot.com. Contact us today