At A Glance
Advertisers are embracing CTV, data collaboration, and AI to deliver more personalized, efficient, and impactful campaigns, transforming living rooms into interactive hubs, utilizing creator-led programming, and streamlining workflows. At Cannes Lions 2025, industry leaders highlighted how privacy-first data practices, supply path optimization, and AI-powered tools are reshaping the advertising ecosystem - areas where Experian plays a key role in enabling trusted, measurable, and innovative outcomes.As artificial intelligence (AI), connected TV (CTV), and data collaboration continue to advance, advertisers are discovering new ways to meet audiences where they are; on their terms and in their spaces. These innovations are creating opportunities to deliver more personalized, impactful campaigns that were unimaginable just a few years ago. At Cannes Lions 2025, we sat down with industry leaders from Butler Till, Comcast Advertising, Index Exchange, IQVIA Digital, Optable, PMG, Samsung Ads, and Sports Innovation Lab.
From reimagining the living room experience to using AI in practice for better outcomes, here’s what we learned about the trends driving advertising forward.
1. CTV turns living rooms into active spaces
CTV has turned the living room into a hub of interaction, discovery, and commerce. Younger audiences are using their TVs like mobile devices; streaming, learning, and even controlling their homes. This shift is creating new opportunities for advertisers to deliver relevant, personalized experiences where audiences are already engaged. With premium content and interactive tools, the living room is no longer just a passive space, it’s where attention meets action, and where brands can connect with audiences in meaningful ways.
How Experian helps
With Experian, advertisers can connect first-party data with CTV IDs, ensuring accurate and measurable targeting while maintaining a privacy-first approach. That means brands reach viewers with messages that feel personal, without losing trust.
“We surveyed 1,000 smart TV owners and found that younger audiences are using their TVs like mobile devices. Two-thirds use them for social media, 40% for self-improvement like Coursera or TED Talks, and 25% for interactivity; controlling appliances or home temperatures. Interactivity with connected TVs is skyrocketing.”
Samsung Ads Justin Evans
2. Creators build stronger connections with audiences
Creators are no longer limited to social media; they are now a driving force in CTV. Creator led programming is capturing attention and driving post view actions, offering advertisers a unique way to connect with passionate, engaged audiences. By thinking of creators as “micro networks” with built in communities, advertisers can meet fans where they already gather and deliver authentic, impactful messages that resonate.
How Experian helps
Experian helps advertisers tap into the creator economy by identifying topical audiences that align with influencer niches—like food, travel, gaming and entertainment—and activating them across the open web. Through Audigent’s integration with DV360, brands can pair Experian’s expansive audience targeting capabilities with Audigent’s Curated Deals to reach engaged viewers in creator-led environments. This approach ensures ads appear where audiences are most receptive, enhancing relevance and performance.
“The creator economy is moving into TV. It’s incredible to see social influencers, once dominant on platforms, now creating high quality content for streaming, networks, and more.”
Butler/TillGina Whelehan
3. Data collaboration that drives better results
Advertisers rely on data to reach the right audiences, but privacy concerns are reshaping how it’s collected, shared, and used. Data collaboration enables brands to combine multiple data sets (like first-party data and syndicated audiences) to improve planning, activation, and measurement. While privacy remains a priority, the focus is on creating actionable insights that drive better results and build trust with consumers. By focusing on consented, privacy safe identity solutions, advertisers can achieve better outcomes while respecting consumer privacy; a win-win for brands and audiences alike.
How Experian helps
Experian’s privacy-first approach ensures that all data activation occurs with compliance and consent. By maintaining high match rates, offering flexible collaboration options (including clean rooms, first-party data onboarding, and syndicated audiences) and adhering to transparent methodologies, Experian facilitates seamless collaboration between brands, publishers, and platforms. This helps build trust and strengthen long-term connections with audiences.
“The area we’re most excited about is identity resolution on the publisher side. Publishers can reinsert signal and create better results for advertisers. This wasn’t always well-articulated, but today we have case studies proving publishers can help improve outcomes.”
OptableVlad Stesin
4. Optimizing supply paths for better outcomes
Supply path optimization (SPO) helps advertisers improve campaign efficiency by increasing viewability and reducing waste. Supply-side decisioning builds on this by identifying the audiences advertisers want to reach, the content those audiences consume, and the publishers with the most relevant inventory. Together, these strategies create a more intelligent and efficient ecosystem, ensuring ads are delivered in the right context, to the right people, on the right platforms.
How Experian helps
Experian’s data solutions, including both Experian’s and Audigent’s contextual and identity capabilities, are available across sell-side (SSPs) and buy-side (DSPs) platforms, enabling smarter decision-making throughout the media supply chain. Audigent’s direct integrations with publishers provide an unfiltered view into available inventory, offering deeper insights that inform campaign optimization. These insights can be activated in real time and transacted within advertisers’ existing buying platforms.
By powering real-time intelligence across the ecosystem, from advertisers to DSPs, SSPs, and publishers, Experian and Audigent help drive better outcomes, more efficient media spend, and greater value for all participants.
“Sell-side decisioning activates the intelligence of the exchange, along with partners like Experian, to optimize auctions in real time. This helps pre-decision buys that flow to the DSPs, making the buying process smarter, more efficient, and ultimately driving better value for marketers and publishers.”
Index ExchangeMike McNeeley
5. AI that streamlines agency workflows
AI is a practical tool that agencies are using to streamline workflows and deliver better results. From planning and pacing to creative iteration, AI is helping teams move faster and smarter. In fact, 67% of global marketing and communications professionals now use AI for content creation frequently or all the time, underscoring its role in modern workflows. The key is to think of AI as a navigator, not a replacement. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing up teams to focus on strategy and creativity, while enabling faster tests, fewer dead ends, and better client clarity.
How Experian helps
Experian uses AI and machine learning to deliver highly personalized marketing solutions. In our Digital Graph, advanced clustering algorithms analyze household and individual device connections, improving targeting and measurement accuracy. We also use AI powered audience recommendations to create tailored audience solutions for clients. Our contextual data models, powered by Audigent’s contextual engine, further improve this process by analyzing bidstream traffic in real time, ensuring audiences are aligned with the most relevant inventory.
“We’ve extended our platform with Marketplace, which lets us integrate third-party partners, new tech, and data seamlessly into activation. Clients are asking for this level of innovation, especially with the speed at which AI is evolving and transforming what’s possible in marketing.”
PMGSam Bloom
Connecting the dots: Data, creativity, and outcomes
The common thread across these insights is how we connect with audiences, collaborate on data, and create meaningful outcomes. By reimagining the living room experience and utilizing AI and creator-led programming, brands are embracing innovation.
How Experian helps
Experian helps you build privacy-first identity foundations, collaborate seamlessly, optimize supply paths, streamline with AI, and connect through creators.
Let’s start a conversation
FAQs
CTV brings premium, interactive streaming to the largest screen at home, allowing brands to reach engaged viewers with measurable, personalized experiences.
It’s the consented, secure use of first-party and partner data (often via clean rooms) to improve planning, activation, and measurement without exposing raw consumer data.
SPO streamlines the path from advertiser to publisher, reducing waste and improving quality. Sell-side decisioning adds real-time intelligence to the exchange, delivering the proper context and audience more efficiently.
Creator-led programming functions like “micro networks” with built-in communities, helping brands show up where fans are already engaged and ready to act.
Viewers use TVs like mobile devices, discovering content, learning, shopping, and interacting; advertisers can meet their intent and drive post-view actions.
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Originally appeared on MarTech Series Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today's complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers. We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever. This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer. Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed. 2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet. The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising. This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach. 2015-2020: The age of walled gardens From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments. However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms. The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web. 2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking. Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments. Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape. With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer. 2025: The omnichannel imperative Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up. The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable. Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Adapting to the future of identity The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant. 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