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As marketers gear up for the 2025 holiday season, economic turbulence, tariffs, and shifting digital habits are changing how and where consumers shop. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still set to be the crown jewels of retail, but winning this year means leaning into data, omnichannel activation, and tools that help you do more with less as you start your Black Friday planning.
Let’s explore this year’s Black Friday trends in relation to last year’s and how to make the most of every opportunity in the 2025 holiday season.
Spending trends we saw in 2024
After years of economic uncertainty, Black Friday 2024 marked a return to retail “normalcy” with record-setting online and in-store shopping that reflected growing optimism and smarter behaviors:
- Online Black Friday sales increased by 10.2% from 2023, largely due to better-timed deals and earlier shopping.
- Mobile shopping made up 69% of global purchases.
- In-store traffic rebounded, surpassing online during Cyber Week for the first time in years.
- Buy now, pay later (BNPL) added $686 million to online sales — an 8.8% YoY increase — as consumers spread out their holiday spending.
- Retailers using AI tools (like chatbots and shopping assistants) saw up to 15% more conversions.
Ultimately, last year’s Black Friday e-commerce trends showed that shoppers prioritized flexible payments, value, and easy, personalized buying experiences.
Key products and categories in 2024
After years of favoring lower-cost essentials, consumers returned to higher-ticket purchases during Cyber Week. The share of expensive goods sold online rose over 15% compared to pre-season figures, with AI-powered product recommendations leading consumers to top-selling products like:
- AirPods Pro
- Ninja Creami
- Our Place Always Pan
- Vitamix blenders
- Oura Ring
The highest-performing gift categories included electronics, apparel, furniture and bedding, groceries, and cosmetics.
2024 Black Friday trends we expect to continue in 2025
As we reflect on a record-breaking 2024 holiday season, we predict many of the key Cyber Monday trends and Black Friday strategies for retailers in 2024 will carry over and intensify in 2025:
- Mobile will remain the primary shopping channel.
- The shift to early shopping will persist.
- AI-driven efficiencies will play an increasing role.
- Retailers that focus on the customer experience will capture the most wallet share.
As a marketer, you can use these insights to plan your Black Friday e-commerce strategy and meet audiences where and when they scroll and shop.
Projected growth YoY
While 2025 holiday retail shopping may not match the explosive growth of 2023 to 2024, consumers are still expected to show up in force for Black Friday in 2025. The National Retail Federation projects that overall U.S. holiday sales will rise between 2.7% and 3.7% compared to last year.
Experian’s 2025 Q1 consumer data paints a more nuanced picture:
- Mass retail transactions remain above 2024 levels, but YoY growth is slowing, from +8% in January to +4% in May.
- Department stores, which grew 10% YoY in January, have since declined to -3% by May.
- Apparel saw a similar trajectory, slipping from +7% growth in Q1 to slightly negative growth leading up to the summer months.
This slowdown suggests early signs of consumer fatigue, especially in discretionary categories, as inflation and tariffs continue to erode the spending power of price-sensitive consumers and small brands that rely heavily on imports.
Emerging trends and behaviors to expect in 2025
With inflation still weighing on household budgets and new tariffs potentially reducing consumer spending power by up to $78 billion, brands and shoppers are entering the holiday season with uncertainty. Roughly 91% of consumers may adjust their buying habits in response to tariff-driven price increases and inflation.
Consumers are still motivated by value, but they’ll expect more for their money and may start deal-hunting even earlier this season. You’ll need to be agile with your messaging, inventory, and budget allocation, as shoppers will still spend when the experience is seamless, personalized, and smart.
Let’s explore the key trends shaping the 2025 holiday season and how you can build them into your omnichannel marketing plan before the rush hits.
Omnichannel campaigns
In 2025, holiday shoppers will be more intentional than impulsive, which means they may zigzag between channels —browsing products on TikTok, watching TV ads, researching on Google, and checking out in-store or online before purchasing. They’ll want consistent, personalized experiences no matter where they engage.
This means you can’t rely on a single sales touchpoint anymore and must deliver a seamless experience wherever your audience spends time. Forrester shows 21% of global B2C leaders are already prioritizing omnichannel, which makes it a competitive necessity.
Fortunately, these efforts pay off. Omnichannel shoppers spend 1.5x more per month than those who shop on a single channel.
How Experian helps
Experian simplifies omnichannel marketing. Our identity graph connects hashed emails, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), connected TV (CTV) IDs, and more so you can define your audience once and reach them consistently across every major channel.
With unified data, identity, and activation, we help you cut through platform silos and deliver coordinated, cross-device campaigns that actually feel connected.
Mobile first
In 2024, over 70% of orders and $195 billion in sales happened on mobile devices, according to Salesforce. As more consumers browse holiday deals from the couch, car, or checkout line, mobile-first shopping is among the top Cyber Monday retail trends and the main channel for on-the-go purchases.
For marketers, this means your mobile experience can make or break your Black Friday results. Responsive design, fast load times, and smooth checkout flows are the new expectations. Brands that invest in sleek mobile sites, intuitive apps, and frictionless buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options will better meet and convert customers where they are at key moments.
How Experian helps
With Experian, you can reach mobile-first shoppers precisely at scale. Our identity graph connects MAIDs to individuals, so you can activate campaigns across mobile apps, SMS, and social with confidence. Define your audience once and deliver consistently personalized offers wherever they scroll, search, or shop.
CTV
On Black Friday 2025, shoppers won’t just be scrolling — they’ll be streaming, too. CTV continues to surge as a key channel for holiday shoppers, with viewership far outpacing ad spend. In 2024, CTV drove 31% of digital audience activation revenue. With nearly half of U.S. viewers expected to tune into free ad-supported TV (FAST) in 2025, CTV is becoming a core part of the Black Friday media mix.
Still, many marketers underestimate the channel, assuming it’s strictly an upper-funnel awareness channel rather than a direct driver of conversions. In reality, CTV can influence high-intent holiday shoppers closer to purchase than many assume.
With more consumers engaging with FAST during the holidays, CTV offers scalable, measurable reach and can fuel conversions across the entire funnel. And when paired with identity resolution and cross-device targeting, it becomes a powerful full-funnel tool.
How Experian helps
Experian gives marketers the household-level insights and activation capabilities to reach the right shoppers at the right frequency across platforms — a must for a high-volume weekend like Black Friday. Our identity graph connects devices within a household to manage frequency, unify messaging, and eliminate waste.
Plus, with support for Universal IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2), you can activate audiences across CTV environments — including FAST — using login-based, privacy-compliant signals for a campaign that connects, converts, and performs on the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
Signal loss
Although Google has reversed its plan to phase out third-party cookies, 40% of browser traffic no longer supports them. You now need various identifiers across devices and platforms to get a complete customer view, especially during Black Friday when reach and precision are key.
That’s why marketers are shifting to alternative IDs like UID2, ID5, and Hadron ID to maintain reach. In 2024, we saw a 50% increase in Experian clients using alternative IDs and a 30% jump in the number resolved to individuals in our Digital Graph. These IDs are unlocking up to 60% incremental reach in campaigns compared to cookies.
Preparing a multi-ID approach and incorporating privacy-first strategies, such as contextual targeting, can give you a competitive edge this holiday season.
How Experian helps
Experian’s identity solutions connect all your digital and offline identifiers into a single, privacy-forward customer profile. This lets you recognize and reach your audiences no matter what device or platform they’re using.
Plus, with Contextually-Indexed Audiences, you can activate high-performing segments instantly in major demand-side platforms (DSPs) without cookies to maintain and improve addressability during the holidays.
RMNs
Retail media networks (RMNs) are set to capture 20% of digital ad spend in 2025. In particular, off-site retail media is expected to surge 42.1% this year, driving more Black Friday campaigns into channels like CTV, programmatic, and social.
This shift reflects a growing demand for full-funnel strategies, broader reach, and cross-channel measurement. RMNs that extend their first-party data beyond owned platforms will be best positioned to deliver results during peak shopping periods like Cyber Week.
However, off-site success hinges on clean, connected data. Many RMNs still face fragmented views of their customers, making it harder to scale audiences and measure performance.
How Experian helps
Experian helps RMNs scale off-site by resolving fragmented identities, enriching first-party data, and enabling seamless activation across channels. Our identity graph connects key digital identifiers to unify customer profiles, while our audience insights add depth with demographic, behavioral, and purchase data.
Curation
Curation is quickly becoming a go-to Black Friday marketing strategy, helping advertisers connect with high-value audiences by blending inventory with audience and contextual data. In fact, by 2026, private marketplace ad spending is projected to grow by $31 billion.
Instead of choosing between wide-open auctions or direct publisher deals, curation offers a powerful middle ground through curated private marketplaces (PMPs) built on first-party publisher data, contextual signals, and alternative IDs.
How Experian helps
Now unified with Audigent, Experian is setting a new standard for curated media buying. Our Curated Deals combine Experian’s powerful identity and data capabilities with Audigent’s flexible activation and audience customization.
You can activate high-performing audiences across DSPs or directly through Audigent’s PMPs to maximize precision, privacy, and scale ahead of the biggest shopping week of the year.
AI-powered shopping experiences
AI is becoming a co-pilot for holiday shoppers and reshaping the customer journey. From researching gift ideas and comparing prices to relying on personalized product recommendations and AI chatbots for faster service, consumers are using AI to shop smarter.
Salesforce reports that AI influenced 19% of holiday purchases in 2024 — a 6% increase from the previous year. In an Experian survey, shoppers shared they’re also using AI to help with BOPIS logistics and even choosing which BNPL option to use at checkout. Influencer content powered by AI and social algorithms is also guiding purchases in real time.
This holiday season, brands that weave AI into their digital storefronts, payment options, and social strategies will drive conversion.
How Experian helps
Experian uses AI and machine learning to help marketers deliver faster, smarter Black Friday campaigns. Our Digital Graph improves targeting with advanced household connections, while machine learning models fill in data gaps and identify high-intent shoppers. We also offer AI-powered audience recommendations and real-time contextual signals, enabling you to quickly build and activate the right segments at scale.
How to prepare for Black Friday 2025
Now that we’ve covered Black Friday trends for this year, it’s time to talk about how you can build them into a data-powered marketing strategy. Here’s where we suggest you focus your Black Friday planning for Cyber Week 2025.
Understand and segment your audience
Winning Black Friday 2025 starts with knowing your audience and how they shop so you can reach them at optimal times with messaging that resonates. Whether you’re targeting early-bird deal hunters or last-minute gifters, audience precision is the foundation for success this holiday season — and Experian can help.
Purchase intent
Drive performance by identifying consumers actively in the market for holiday purchases. With Experian’s holiday shopping audiences (available across major DSPs and platforms like Audigent, The Trade Desk, and DirectTV), you can reach:
- Last-Minute Shoppers
- One-Stop Holiday Shoppers
- Post-Holiday Shoppers
- Heavy Gift Givers
These intent-rich segments can help you capture demand at every phase of the season.
Spending behavior
While some consumers may splurge this year, others are tightening their belts due to economic turbulence. Experian’s pre-built holiday audiences help you target accordingly, with segments like:
- Holiday High Spenders and Moderate Spenders
- Big Box/Club Stores
- Discount Holiday Shoppers, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Shoppers
These segments can help you optimize campaign spend based on wallet size.
Channel preferences
Knowing where your audience shops is just as important as how much they spend or what they buy. Experian offers audiences like:
- eCommerce Diehards
- Brick-and-Mortar Diehards
- Impulse Buyers
- BOPIS Shoppers
Tailor your media mix and creative strategy to align with their channel behavior, whether they’re browsing in-store, online, or on social.
Demographic, lifestyle, and behavioral data
Experian helps you tap into rich demographic and lifestyle data to better understand and engage high-value segments, whether that’s suburban deal hunters, Gen Z beauty buyers, or luxury holiday splurgers.
And by layering in Experian Marketing Attributes — 5,000+ attributes that include financial behaviors, interests, shopping patterns, car ownership, media consumption, and more — you can gain a clearer picture of age, gender, purchase behaviors, and content habits for refined holiday targeting.
With our data marketplace, audiences are more accessible and actionable than ever. We offer:
- Diverse, high-fidelity partner audiences
- Easily activate audiences from 31+ premium data providers, including:
- Attain: Real-time, permissioned transaction data from 8 million U.S. consumers
- Alliant: Predictive audiences built from billions of consumer transactions across key verticals
- Circana: Loyalty-based CPG and general merchandise audiences
- Dun & Bradstreet: Privacy-compliant B2B audiences based on firmographic and professional attributes
- Easily activate audiences from 31+ premium data providers, including:
- Flexible activation across top platforms
- Our identity graph powers our data marketplace, enabling audiences to be easily activated and highly addressable across display, mobile, and CTV with 10+ activation platforms, including Madhive, Open AP, Optimum, and Yieldmo.
- Privacy-first audience planning
- All data in our marketplace meets strict privacy and compliance standards, helping brands scale campaigns confidently.
- Custom and pre-built audience options
- Mix and match from 2,400+ Experian Audiences and Partner Audiences to find the right shoppers and meet your campaign goals.
Our data marketplace delivers the people you want to reach, where you need to reach them, with the insights to optimize in real time.
Personalize promotions
One-size-fits-all promotions won’t cut it in 2025. Consumers expect relevance at every touchpoint and ignore what feels generic or off-base. With the abundance of Black Friday offers, shoppers are filtering fast and prioritizing brands that understand their needs, preferences, and timing.
Here’s how you can deliver on these demands:
- Deliver targeted product recommendations: Whether through chatbots or personalized emails, consumers want help quickly finding what they need. Brands that invest in smart recommendation engines position themselves to drive cart additions and increase average order value (AOV).
- Customize promo codes by segment: Everyone loves discounts, but not all shoppers should get the same one. Use customer segments like high-spenders, last-minute shoppers, or deal-hunters from Experian’s syndicated holiday audiences to offer custom promo codes, boost conversions, and avoid over-discounting with those who would buy regardless.
- Optimize the timing of offers: Timing is everything during Cyber Week when inboxes and feeds are flooded. Use our behavioral and lifestyle data to determine when your segments are most active and likely to buy, and schedule your best offers for maximum impact.
- Use Experian Activity Feed: Black Friday 2025 will span devices, stores, and channels. Activity Feed connects the dots between online ad exposures and offline sales, helping you measure the impact of your campaigns and identify what drives conversions.
Case study: How Cuebiq increased match rates with Activity Feed
Using Activity Feed, Cuebiq, resolved digital ad exposures to MAIDs so they could know the impact of their campaigns on in-store visits and purchases.
Within three weeks, they resolved 85% of ad events to households across web, mobile, and CTV, giving their clients a clearer view of what drove store traffic and sales.
“In just a few weeks, they were able to maximize the match rate across the fragmented digital inventory, solving a huge problem when it comes to cross-channel attribution.”
Luca Bocchiardi,Director of Product, Cuebiq
Experian can help you win big this holiday season
Marketers are entering this season with more pressure, more complexity, and more opportunity than ever before. Whether you’re grappling with signal loss, evolving your omnichannel mix, or launching your first curated PMP, Experian has the data, identity infrastructure, and activation tools to help you win. Download our 2025 Holiday spending trends and insights report, in collaboration with GroundTruth, to access our predictions for this year’s holiday season.
Want help building your Black Friday marketing strategy? Let’s talk.
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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 Eric Shiffman, VP of Product Marketing at Yieldmo. Here are five key takeaways from Eric’s insights: Tailored campaigns with Experian data: Yieldmo integrates Experian’s trusted identity and audience data to deliver creative campaigns tailored to specific audiences, ensuring more meaningful engagement. Omnichannel activation made easy: Experian’s data marketplace helps Yieldmo expand its reach across display, mobile, and CTV, creating seamless cross-channel advertising strategies. Advanced targeting and insights: The combination of Yieldmo’s attention signals and Experian’s identity solutions allows advertisers to pinpoint audiences with precision and confidence. Driving results in key verticals: Retail, CPG, and automotive campaigns use Experian data on Yieldmo’s platform to achieve improved personalization, targeting accuracy, and measurable outcomes. Scalable and privacy-conscious advertising: Yieldmo’s partnership with Experian ensures scalable solutions that balance advanced targeting with privacy-focused practices, benefiting advertisers across all industries. About Yieldmo Yieldmo often describes itself as ‘the creative and media results company,’ using a predictive, provocative, and proven approach. Could you give us a brief overview of how this vision shaped the company and how you differentiate yourselves in ad tech? Yieldmo was built on the belief that every ad experience should be as engaging and human centered as the content around it. By merging creative excellence with advanced technology and AI, we enable advertisers to deliver custom ad formats that spark emotion and inspire action. Our proprietary attention signals and predictive format selection allow brands to optimize for outcomes before impressions are served. This approach, combined with privacy-safe inventory curation, ensures that our solutions stand out in their ability to deliver both creativity and results. Creative and inventory performance You’re known for delivering premium experiences across top-tier publishers. What strategies or innovations does Yieldmo employ to boost creative performance, increase engagement, and optimize inventory for your partners? At Yieldmo, we emphasize the fusion of creative and media. We utilize predictive AI and a vast dataset to generate, customize, and match creatives with the right audiences and page contexts, enabling proven performance and learnings. On the supply side, we elevate publisher inventory by aligning high-quality ads with relevant content in innovative, non-intrusive creative formats. This dual focus ensures that every impression is primed for engagement, delivering tangible value to advertisers and optimal monetization for publishers. Partnership with Experian As a partner of Experian, how do our identity and audience data complement Yieldmo’s platform, and why do you see this collaboration particularly beneficial for the broader advertising industry? Experian’s robust identity and audience data strengthen Yieldmo’s ability to serve precisely tailored creative experiences. By integrating Experian’s insights with our proprietary attention signals and AI-driven predictive systems, we can optimize audience targeting and engagement strategies. This partnership represents the advancement of outcome-driven advertising while giving brands the confidence of reaching the right consumers in meaningful ways. Interest in Experian's data marketplace Experian recently introduced a new data marketplace aimed at simplifying data partner audience activation across display, mobile, and CTV. Which elements of this offering are most exciting from your perspective, and how do you anticipate it shaping Yieldmo’s solutions? The unified approach of Experian’s data marketplace to streamline audience activation aligns seamlessly with Yieldmo’s vision of delivering data-driven creative optimization. The ability to activate comprehensive data sets across multiple channels expands our omnichannel solutions, bringing precision and scalability to advertisers. Lately, we have focused resources on delivering thoughtful, cross-channel creative experiences, so aligning audiences to those is a logical extension. Verticals using third-party data From your experience, which verticals or industries are most likely to activate third-party data campaigns on Yieldmo’s platform, and have you observed any emerging trends in how advertisers use data from Experian or other providers? The retail, CPG, and automotive industries have been leading adopters of third-party data, using it to fine-tune targeting and personalize their messaging. Recently, we’ve noticed a shift toward bringing more post campaign measurement insights to the supply side–brand lift, foot traffic, conversion–for better optimization, whereas historically this valuable dataset was trapped in buy-side platforms. Data utilization and success stories Could you share how Yieldmo’s data-driven approach has evolved and any standout success stories that highlight your platform’s impact and value to partners? Yieldmo has always prioritized data to inform creative decisioning, from predictive ad placements to real-time optimization. In this award-winning Humane Society case study, we utilized media curation and predictive creative to drive a >170% CTR increase, 5x the campaign benchmark, leading to more page visits and donations. Thanks for the interview. Any recommendations for our readers if they want to learn more? To learn more about our solutions and partnership opportunities, visit the Yieldmo website or contact your Experian account representative to schedule your free match test. Contact us About our expert Eric Shiffman, Vice President of Product Marketing, Yieldmo Eric Shiffman is a product marketing leader with extensive experience in advertising technology. At Yieldmo, he drives strategies that blend AI, creative optimization, and privacy-conscious solutions to deliver measurable creative and media results. Eric translates complex technologies into actionable messaging, positioning, and insights, and evangelizing products and solutions. His expertise spans creative optimization, data-driven advertising, CTV, and audience solutions. Latest posts
Originally appeared in Streaming Media Magazine Navigating today’s fragmented, privacy-conscious media landscape is a bit like stepping into a dense jungle. The buy-side—marketers, agencies, and demand-side platforms (DSPs)—must find their way through signal loss, measurement challenges, and evolving consumer expectations. But this isn’t just a challenge; it’s a strategic opportunity. Let’s dive into how buy-side players can use Experian’s advanced data and identity solutions to be their guide through the jungle and emerge as winners. Marketers: Maintaining personalization and measurement across channels Marketers are navigating an increasingly fragmented media jungle, where the deprecation of signals like cookies, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), and IP addresses makes finding and understanding audiences feel like guesswork. To chart a clear path, marketers need a reliable compass—and identity resolution provides exactly that. A strong identity provider, grounded in offline data like names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails, acts as a guide through the chaos. By connecting offline signals with digital identifiers in a privacy-first manner, marketers can uncover the relationships between households and devices, then enrich those profiles with valuable marketing data. With a complete view of your customers, you gain deeper insights and can seamlessly reach the right audience across channels—even as signals evolve. It’s a marketer’s North Star—constant, dependable, and always pointing you in the right direction. How Experian can help Imagine a financial services brand aiming to connect with high-net-worth individuals across today’s fragmented media world. They’ve excelled on social and search but now want to dive into connected TV (CTV) and other emerging channels. Enter Experian’s Digital Graph. By seamlessly connecting digital identifiers like MAIDs, CTV IDs and hashed emails (HEMs), our graph becomes the bridge that unifies their audience across every channel. Suddenly, the same audience that saw their ad on social during lunch is now watching a personalized spot on CTV that evening, all thanks to Experian. The result? A cohesive campaign that delivers hyper-relevant messages, stronger engagement, and measurable success. With Experian, fragmentation becomes connection, and personalization stays powerful across the entire media landscape. Agencies: Strategic partners in a fragmented world Agencies are the architects of the identity jungle, building bridges that guide brands through fragmentation and deliver campaign success. Thriving in this terrain requires data solutions that create actionable insights, enable personalization, and drive measurable outcomes. To meet marketers’ demands, many agencies have invested heavily—acquiring data companies or forging strategic partnerships to strengthen their foundations in data and identity solutions. These investments help them connect fragmented audience data and unlock new opportunities for their clients. But even with in-house capabilities, agencies often need more—more attributes, more integrations, and greater connectivity. In the jungle of identity, success isn’t just about building better data assets; it’s about ensuring those assets can be utilized across platforms. How Experian can help Picture a large independent agency ready to step up its game—expanding beyond its middle-market niche to attract enterprise-level clients. But to play in the big leagues, they need more than a solid strategy; they need data and identity solutions that deliver a competitive edge. Enter Experian. With our rich identity graph and deep customer insights, the agency can unlock new opportunities for its clients. Imagine offering enterprises the ability to connect fragmented audience data, create hyper-targeted campaigns, and measure success across every channel. The payoff? The agency doesn’t just win over new enterprise clients; it strengthens relationships with existing customers by proving it can navigate today’s fragmented media landscape with precision and measurable impact. With Experian, the agency becomes an indispensable strategic partner in the data-driven advertising world. DSPs: Navigating signal loss with a multi-ID strategy For DSPs, navigating the identity jungle means forging a path through the winding trails of cookieless strategies. With third-party cookies fading and no single identity solution—like Unified ID 2.0 (UID2)—able to cover all media engagement, DSPs must adapt to a multi-ID world. The challenge is twofold: finding flexible solutions to manage a multitude of identifiers while staying compliant with a growing number of state-level privacy laws. It’s not just a technical problem; it’s a call for strategic vision. And the way to thrive in this ever-changing terrain is to invest in identity solutions that connect digital and offline identifiers to a single customer profile. How Experian can help Imagine a DSP navigating a complex web of identifiers—UID2, HEMs, proprietary IDs—while juggling compliance with evolving privacy laws. Experian steps in as the ultimate connector. Our identity solutions, powered by stable offline data, are signal-agnostic and integrated across the advertising ecosystem. This ensures that DSPs can confidently manage multiple identity frameworks, keeping campaigns targeted, measurable, and compliant. With Experian, DSPs gain more than a stopgap solution; they get a future-proof identity strategy. The result? Better targeting, smoother omnichannel execution, and the strategic edge needed to thrive in a fragmented, multi-ID world. Turning identity challenges into a strategic advantage The identity jungle is a thriving ecosystem for those with the right guide. Experian helps marketers, agencies, and DSPs chart the course by unifying multiple identifiers into a single, complete customer profile. With the right tools (and a good map), buy-side stakeholders can learn more about their customer, reach audiences across channels, and deliver personalized marketing. Read our companion article to learn how the sell-side is approaching data and identity challenges. Read now Get started today Latest posts
We spoke with industry leaders from Ampersand, Basis Technologies, Captify, Cuebiq, CvE, Fetch, Madhive, MiQ, and Samsung to gather insights on how innovations in data and identity are creating stronger consumer connections. Here are five key insights to consider. 1. Build on trust with first-party data Stricter privacy regulations and growing customer expectations mean businesses must rethink how they gather and use data. A robust first-party data strategy centers on gathering high-quality data, such as behavioral and transactional data. By using behavioral, lifestyle, and purchasing data, brands can craft personalized strategies that align with their goals. This approach balances effective targeting with building trust and complying with privacy rules. Integrating identity solutions like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2) and ID5 into existing data strategies improves interoperability across platforms while keeping user privacy intact. These tools help create more effective campaigns. "We've been preparing and leaning into educating our clients around the value of first-party data. These are very important and primary considerations in any of our campaigns."April Weeks, Basis Technologies 2. Align metrics with business goals To demonstrate clear value, campaigns need to tie their outcomes to broader goals. Relying only on click-through rates or CPMs won’t cut it. Metrics that measure meaningful results, like driving sales or increasing customer retention, provide greater transparency than surface level data, like clicks or impressions. A continuous feedback loop between targeting and measurement ensures campaigns can be refined to better align with business objectives. This feedback helps marketers understand who they are targeting and how those audiences are driving key business results. Shifting focus to metrics that resonate with stakeholders ensures that marketing efforts are evaluated based on their true contribution to the company's objectives. "The television industry has access to more data than ever before, and at Samsung Ads, our ACR technology helps us provide valuable insights about what content and ads are being viewed. This abundance of data enables us to support clients in aligning their campaigns with business objectives effectively."Justin Evans, Samsung Ads 3. Personalize experiences to boost engagement Personalization drives stronger customer relationships by delivering tailored experiences to individual customer needs. Using data-driven insights to fine-tune offers and messaging makes interactions more relevant, strengthening brand loyalty. Combining behavioral, lifestyle, and transactional data provides a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and ensures each touchpoint feels personal. Testing and iterating on personalization strategies also helps identify which data and approaches yield the best results. Scaling these efforts means customers receive the right messaging at the right time, and businesses see better outcomes. "Every business should be building a data strategy that thinks about the different versions of data that exist and how they bring that together. They don't necessarily need to own all of it but have a clear rationale and strategy about where you're using which data sets."Paul Frampton, CvE 4. Utilize advanced measurement tools for smarter decisions Improving the effectiveness of campaigns starts with using sophisticated measurement tools to gain actionable insights. Using analytics like brand lift studies, foot traffic analysis, app download tracking, incrementality, and share of search allows marketers to understand the full impact of their efforts. With these resources, teams can pinpoint what’s working, make real-time adjustments, and refine their approach. This adaptability ensures budgets are used as effectively as possible. Learn how Swiss Sense measured marketing outcomes using Mosaic® "We are playing a leading role in democratizing new tools for local advertisers. By mimicking the marketing funnel mentality, we've introduced solutions ranging from measuring brand lift to tracking foot traffic and app downloads."Luc Dumont, Madhive 5. Adapt quickly to stay competitive The only constant in advertising is change. Adapting quickly to new technologies and consumer behaviors keeps businesses competitive. A culture of agility fosters innovation, making it easier to respond to industry shifts and discover new opportunities. Companies that anticipate change and invest in modern data solutions position themselves for long-term growth. Whether it’s adjusting to privacy updates, exploring emerging tech, or staying flexible, businesses must continuously invest in adapting their platforms and strategies. "Falling behind is not really an option. There's always a change in advertising and in data where there's a new horizon. The people who stay close to that and innovate will always follow it."Amelia Waddington, Captify Shaping the future Building meaningful consumer connections requires advertisers to combine robust data strategies with flexibility and innovation. By focusing on these five considerations, marketers can adapt to today’s challenges while preparing for what’s ahead. Connect with our experts Latest posts