At A Glance
Commerce media is blurring the line between first- and third-party data as retailers make their first-party audiences available to outside advertisers. This article explains how each data type is used and onboarded, when first-party onboarding becomes third-party onboarding, and how Experian supports both models.In this article…
Key takeaways
- First-party data comes from direct audience relationships; third-party data comes from outside them.
- Data onboarding connects offline audience records to digital identifiers and platforms for activation and measurement.
- First-party onboarding activates a brand’s own data; third-party onboarding helps data providers distribute and monetize audiences for outside advertisers.
- The same data can be first-party to its provider and third-party to an advertiser. Ownership doesn’t change, but permissions, governance, and responsibilities expand.
- Experian supports First-Party Onboarding and activation through Audience Engine and audience distribution and monetization through Third-Party Onboarding, with identity resolution, platform integrations, and complementary measurement capabilities.
In the past, first-party onboarding focused on activating a brand’s own customer data, while third-party data helped advertisers reach external audiences. But the rise of commerce media networks (CMNs) — which now influence over 14% of all digital ad spend — has blurred those once-clear lines.
CMNs, retail media ecosystems, and brand partnerships are reshaping how data is shared, accessed, and activated. Today, the question isn’t just who owns the data but why it’s being used. Whether to strengthen customer relationships or create new revenue opportunities, intent now shapes how data must be governed, shared, and measured.
If you have strong first-party data, this shift creates opportunities to deliver more personalized, privacy-safe campaigns to your own audiences and to extend that data’s value by enabling partners to reach new segments.
In this connected ecosystem, data onboarding helps brands activate their own customer data and helps data providers scale, distribute, and monetize audiences responsibly. We provide the identity and activation capabilities that support both models across the advertising ecosystem.
What is data onboarding?
Data onboarding moves offline consumer data — like CRM records, loyalty details, or transaction histories — into digital environments for activation and measurement. It connects real-world insight with digital engagement across display, social, search, connected TV (CTV), and commerce media. Data onboarding can help you manage signal fragmentation, disconnected data, and rising privacy expectations.
How the data is used — and the relationship between the data provider and the party activating it — determines which onboarding model applies:
- First-party onboarding: A brand activates its own customer data across digital platforms.
- Third-party onboarding: A data provider makes its audiences available to outside advertisers, often for monetization.
We help you succeed in both models. With AI-driven identity resolution, persistent identifiers, and privacy-first infrastructure, we make onboarding accurate, compliant, and scalable, regardless of who owns the data.
Why do marketers need data onboarding?
Even the most data-rich brands often have a limited view and reach when it comes to their audiences. They’re confined to the data they collect directly and to the owned channels they use to engage those people. Customer files may reveal who’s already in the ecosystem, but not always where those people spend time, how they behave across channels, or why they make certain decisions.
Onboarding bridges that gap. It transforms offline data into digital activation power, helping you connect insight with action. We make this possible at scale with trusted identity resolution, audience modeling expertise, and seamless data integration across platforms, helping you activate confidently and compliantly.
With our onboarding solutions, you can achieve:
- Unified customer identity across devices, channels, and touchpoints.
- Cross-channel personalization with consistent, relevant messaging wherever customers engage.
- Scaled, privacy-compliant reach beyond owned channels without sacrificing control or consent.
- Better insights and audience creation by blending first-party and Experian Marketing Data for a deeper understanding.
- Cross-channel activation with deep integrations into the advertising ecosystem.
What is first-party data?
To understand how onboarding creates these benefits, it helps to distinguish the types of data you prepare for activation. First-party data is the information you collect directly through your own interactions with customers, prospects, or website and app visitors. It can include purchase history, CRM records, email signups, loyalty-program activity, survey responses, and digital behavior across your owned channels.
Because first-party data comes from your direct relationship with your audience, you typically have visibility into how it was collected, what permissions apply, and how accurately it reflects your customers. This context helps you assess its quality, provenance, and consent status in line with your organization’s data practices. Although outside technology providers may help you collect, store, or activate the data, its first-party status comes from your audience relationships.
First-party data forms the foundation of personalization and first-party data marketing. It helps you tailor messages, strengthen existing customer relationships, and complement external audience strategies with insights from your direct interactions.
What is third-party data?
Third-party data comes from outside your direct customer relationships. It’s typically collected or aggregated from multiple sources and made available to you by an external provider. Depending on the provider, those sources may include permitted public records, transaction-based insights, surveys, research panels, and other verified data sets.
In commerce media, however, classification can also depend on how the data is used. A retailer’s shopper data is first-party data to the retailer, but it can function as third-party data when made available to you as an outside advertiser. This crossover makes data ownership, permitted use, and transparency especially important in CMNs.
Third-party data can extend your reach, provide insight into prospective customers, and fill gaps that your first-party data can’t cover alone. Its quality and value depend on responsible sourcing, clear data provenance, appropriate permissions, and transparent governance. Used alongside first-party data, it can support a more complete audience strategy.
Although their ownership, permissions, and use cases differ, first- and third-party data move through many of the same foundational onboarding steps. Knowing those steps makes it easier to see how identity resolution, governance, and activation come together.
Core steps in the onboarding process
While onboarding can vary across use cases, the foundational process is broadly consistent. Our AI-enhanced identity infrastructure streamlines every stage of data migration and activation, making each step safer and faster:
- Data ingestion: Securely transfer data into the onboarding environment using appropriate safeguards, with applicable permissions and intended uses documented from the start.
- Transformation: Cleanse, standardize, and format records to align with digital identifiers. This reduces inconsistencies and makes every record easier to recognize and activate later.
- Identity resolution: Connect offline identifiers (names, emails, addresses) with digital identifiers (hashed emails, mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs), CTV IDs, and universal IDs) through our Offline and Digital Graphs. This connects customer records with addressable digital identities while limiting the exposure of raw personal information.
- Audience matching: Translate the resolved audience into the identifiers supported by each selected activation partner to maintain consistent reach across demand-side platforms (DSPs), social, CTV, and other platforms.
- Activation: Deliver the resolved audience to selected DSPs, social, CTV, TV, or commerce media destinations. In first-party onboarding, a brand activates its own audience. In third-party onboarding, a data provider makes its audience available for outside advertisers to activate.
Behind this flow is our Digital Graph, which links 250 million U.S. individuals and 4.2 billion digital identifiers refreshed weekly. It’s the foundation that keeps onboarding accurate as the signal landscape shifts.
First-party vs. third-party data onboarding
Every digital marketing data point has a story, but whose story it tells depends on who’s using it. That relationship helps determine whether data is onboarded for the provider’s own activation or made available to outside advertisers. Both models support modern marketing, but they carry different expectations for control, consent, and accountability.
First-party onboarding: Activate your own data responsibly and strategically
First-party onboarding takes the customer data you already have and prepares it for identity resolution and activation across digital platforms. You’ll use that data to build and reach your own audiences instead of making it available for use by outside advertisers. This turns existing customer insight into an addressable marketing resource while preserving your control over how the data is activated.
How first-party onboarding works
A credit card company, for example, might securely upload a CRM file containing hashed email addresses to Experian’s Audience Engine. Our identity graph connects those records with addressable digital identifiers, and the company can then activate the resulting audience across DSPs, CTV, social, and display without sending raw personally identifiable information (PII) to those platforms.
Why control and responsible use matter in first-party onboarding
First-party onboarding gives you control over how your customer data is prepared and activated. You decide which records to onboard, where the resulting audiences can be used, and how permissions are carried through the process. Because those permissions are tied to your direct customer relationships, they provide important context for assessing data provenance and permitted uses.
Responsible first-party data use still depends on thoughtful governance, especially when outside technology and activation partners are involved. First-party data should be managed according to applicable permissions, privacy requirements, and permitted uses.
When managed responsibly, first-party onboarding can help you:
- Personalize messages for known customers
- Re-engage lapsed buyers or loyalty members
- Suppress existing customers from prospecting campaigns
- Build more accurate audience segments and targeting strategies
- Measure performance using closed-loop attribution
Experian First-Party Onboarding puts these principles into practice by helping your brand securely prepare and activate data collected through direct customer relationships. We use privacy-focused identity resolution and controlled activation across selected destinations to keep data encrypted, help you maintain control, and support compliant use. This foundation can support more relevant campaigns, effective measurement, and stronger customer trust over time.
Third-party onboarding: Share and monetize data responsibly
Third-party onboarding begins when a data provider makes its audiences available for use by outside advertisers. It helps data providers, publishers, retailers, and CMNs turn audience insights into addressable, privacy-safe segments that advertisers can activate across digital channels.
How third-party onboarding works
With Experian Third-Party Onboarding, a data provider can securely send syndicated or custom audiences, connect them to our identity foundation, organize and price them, and choose where they’re available. Once those audiences are distributed to selected destinations, reporting shows usage by segment, advertiser, and destination.
Let’s say a retailer collects first-party shopper data like product purchases, loyalty card usage, and store visits. Then, they partner with us to make that audience available to outside advertisers, such as a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand.
Through Experian Third-Party Onboarding, those audiences are resolved, privacy-protected, and distributed to integrated destinations such as The Trade Desk, Magnite, or NBCUniversal for activation.
- To the retailer, it’s their first-party data.
- To the CPG, it’s third-party data they can use for targeted campaigns.
- To us, it’s an opportunity to ensure the entire exchange is accurate and compliant.
Why scale and responsible data sharing matter in third-party onboarding
Scale is one of the primary benefits of third-party onboarding, but it creates value differently depending on your role:
- If you’re a data provider, third-party onboarding expands the addressability and distribution of syndicated audiences or custom audiences across more activation destinations, giving you new opportunities to monetize those insights.
- If you’re an advertiser, those audiences provide access to insight and reach beyond your own first-party data, helping you fill audience gaps, connect with segments underrepresented in your own first-party data, and enter new markets.
This exchange supports CMNs, commerce media, and the data-sharing economy overall.
Sustainable scale depends on responsible data sharing, including transparent data sourcing, appropriately documented permissions and permitted uses, and processes that support consumer choices. That responsibility is shared among data providers, onboarding providers, activation platforms, and advertisers.
Experian’s ethical enablement role in third-party onboarding
Our enablement role is both technical and ethical. Our deep expertise enables us to partner with brands and support their monetization efforts, helping them derive new value from their data while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and compliance. Meanwhile, our infrastructure ensures third-party data onboarding happens securely and transparently:
- Identity resolution expands reach without overexposing identifiers.
- Data verification and governance ensure partners meet strict privacy standards.
- Revenue-share structures maintain fairness without hidden costs.
- Cross-channel integrations enable you to onboard your data once and distribute it for activation across programmatic, CTV, and social through our 30+ direct and 200+ indirect destination partnerships.
When first-party onboarding turns into third-party onboarding
When data is made available beyond the provider’s direct use, privacy expectations change, and the rules of onboarding start to look a little different. This stage can feel complex, but with the right approach, the crossover becomes clear. It’s a natural evolution that helps you connect data more effectively and collaborate confidently.
Here’s what that can look like. A retailer uses first-party onboarding to connect its loyalty records with digital identifiers and reach its own customers across digital channels, while managing the data according to the applicable permissions. Then comes collaboration. The retailer makes that audience available to a brand, such as a CPG company, that wants to reach those shoppers across connected TV or the open web.
At that moment, the retailer’s first-party data becomes the CPG’s third-party data. Ownership doesn’t change, but responsibilities expand to additional participants, along with new privacy and compliance considerations.
This “crossover moment,” when first-party onboarding turns into third-party activation, is a small shift with big potential that can lead to new reach, deepen collaboration, and strengthen customer connections across the marketing ecosystem when managed responsibly.
Why clarity matters in the crossover between first- and third-party onboarding
When data starts flowing beyond owned channels, questions naturally come up. You may want to know:
- Who “owns” the audience once it’s shared with a partner or DSP?
- Whose privacy notice applies — the retailer’s, the brand’s, or both?
- How do we keep match accuracy without overexposing PII?
- Who’s responsible for opt-outs and suppression compliance downstream?
These are the right questions to be asking, and they’re signs of a mature, data-driven strategy. Asking them is what helps you strengthen governance, build trust, and get more value from collaboration. With the right framework in place, what could feel complicated becomes clear, opening the door to more confident growth across CMNs and other shared-data environments.
How Experian brings clarity and control to the first- and third-party onboarding crossover
As a neutral, privacy-first partner, we provide the infrastructure designed to support secure, compliant data handling. Given the blurring lines between data ownership and activation rights, our connected, AI-enhanced data and identity foundation helps retailers, brands, and platforms move from onboarding to activation responsibly. For CMNs, it supports deeper shopper insights, off-site addressability, contextually aware activation, and transparent measurement.
Our onboarding solutions help both retailers and advertisers maintain trust through:
- Clear data controls and consent management: We apply data-handling controls designed to respect each party’s permissions and use requirements.
- Accurate, privacy-safe identity resolution: Our Offline and Digital Graphs connect offline and digital identifiers across individuals, households, and devices, supporting accurate matching while protecting consumer information.
- Connected curation, activation, and measurement: We support activation across leading programmatic, social, and TV platforms. Experian Curation packages high-intent audiences with premium inventory into activation-ready Curated Deals, helping you simplify media buying and reach audiences across channels. Activity Feed connects event-level digital activity to identity, while Experian Outcomes connects media exposure with actions such as sales, visits, and website activity.
This is how we transform complex data challenges into seamless, scalable collaborations that give you the confidence to expand responsibly into commerce media and commerce ecosystems.
Why choose Experian’s onboarding solutions?
The value of data onboarding depends on accurate identity, responsible data handling, flexible activation, and the ability to apply what you learn. We connect these capabilities to help brands activate their own data and help data providers distribute their audiences across the advertising ecosystem.
1. Trusted data and identity foundation built on our Offline and Digital Graphs and enriched with Experian Marketing Attributes
When incomplete or siloed customer records limit reach and understanding, we connect data and identity to create a clearer, more consistent view of your audience.
Our Offline and Digital Graphs play distinct but complementary roles. Offline Graph connects offline identifiers such as names and addresses, while the Digital Graph unifies digital identifiers across individuals, households, and devices. Experian Marketing Attributes adds demographic, lifestyle, spending, and behavioral insights that can enrich audience understanding and inform segmentation.
These capabilities help you improve match rates, understand audiences more fully, and maintain consistent audience definitions from onboarding through activation and measurement.
2. Privacy-first and compliance-led onboarding
Given tightening regulations and growing consumer expectations, responsible data handling must be built into every stage of onboarding. We bring decades of experience as a data steward to the way data is sourced, resolved, shared, and activated.
Our approach is guided by the Experian Global Data Principles, which center on security, integrity, fairness, transparency, and inclusion. We evaluate data sources and permissions, apply privacy-focused controls, and help clients support their own privacy and consent obligations while protecting data integrity throughout the onboarding process.
3. Audience onboarding and activation with Audience Engine
Audience Engine brings audience onboarding, insight, creation, and activation into one connected self-service platform. You can upload your first-party data and match it to our identity graph, explore audience insights, build custom or lookalike audiences, and access third-party audiences through our data marketplace.
Once an audience is ready, you can distribute it across more than 200 programmatic, social, connected TV, and TV destinations. Building an audience once and activating it across multiple platforms helps reduce fragmented workflows while keeping audience definitions and configurations consistent.
4. Platform flexibility and contextual activation across the AdTech ecosystem
Different onboarding goals require distinct workflows. Brands can use Audience Engine to onboard and activate their own first-party data, while data providers, publishers, retailers, and commerce media networks can use Experian Third-Party Onboarding to distribute and monetize syndicated or custom audiences. Both solutions connect audiences with leading programmatic, social, and TV destinations.
We also support privacy-safe activation in signal-limited environments through Contextually-Indexed Audiences. Using real-time analysis and machine learning, this solution identifies websites and apps that over-index for specific audience segments, allowing you to reach relevant environments without relying on cookies or user identifiers.
This flexibility allows brands to choose where they activate and data providers to choose where their audiences are made available, supported by our identity foundation and onboarding expertise.
5. Connected audience insight and measurement
Onboarding creates more value when you can understand an audience before activation and evaluate its performance afterward. We connect onboarding with complementary data and analytics capabilities across the campaign lifecycle.
Marketing Attributes can enrich your understanding of customers and prospects with demographic, lifestyle, and behavioral insight. After activation, Experian Outcomes connects media exposure with actions such as sales, visits, and website activity to show what drove performance.
These capabilities help you move from audience understanding to activation and measurement, then apply what you learn to refine future audience and media strategies.
6. Human-centered innovation
Marketing should strengthen relationships and build trust. Our AI-driven identity systems are designed to protect privacy, respect individuals, and create real human value — helping you connect with people meaningfully. They aren’t built to collect more data but to make better use of the data you already have by connecting insights responsibly and ethically.
Every innovation at Experian is guided by the principle of balancing personalization with compliance.
Top use cases for Experian’s onboarding solutions
Our onboarding solutions are transforming how brands operate across industries every day. Whether you’re deepening loyalty, expanding reach, or proving performance, we help connect data responsibly to drive measurable results.
Here’s where we make the biggest impact:
- Automotive: Connect purchase intent data with digital identifiers for more efficient targeting.
- Commerce media: Use First-Party Onboarding to activate owned customer data and Third-Party Onboarding to distribute and monetize audiences for outside advertisers, all while supporting compliance and accurate attribution.
- CPG: Activate shopper data through retailer partnerships to drive off-site reach and stronger brand collaboration.
- Data providers: Monetize audience segments across our programmatic and TV integrations.
- Financial services: Deliver compliant, personalized cross-channel offers with unified identity.
- Healthcare: Use National Provider Identifier (NPI) onboarding to reach healthcare professionals compliantly.
- Retail: Power loyalty personalization, partner monetization, and CMN audience activation.
Across each use case, our privacy-first identity foundation turns data onboarding into a trusted driver of growth and stronger customer relationships.
Navigate the new data economy with Experian
Data onboarding has come a long way, mirroring the changes in marketing itself. We’ve moved from relying on third-party cookies to empowering first-party data, and now to building collaborative ecosystems like CMNs.
At Experian, we’re right in the middle of that evolution. With decades of data expertise, privacy leadership, and AI-driven activation, we help you connect more responsibly, measure what matters, and grow with confidence.
Want to see what that looks like for your brand? Let’s build safer connections together.
Start connecting responsibly
Data onboarding FAQs
First-party data is information you collect directly from your customers or audiences, such as CRM records, purchase history, loyalty activity, and website or app behavior. It doesn’t rely on third-party cookies, though external partners may help collect or activate it. First-party onboarding links these records to digital identifiers so you can activate known audiences across channels.
Third-party data is information sourced outside your direct customer relationships, typically collected or aggregated by an external provider. It helps extend reach and fill audience gaps not covered by your first-party data. In commerce media, a retailer’s first-party audience can also serve as third-party data for advertisers, with onboarding enabling responsible activation and distribution.
Data onboarding is the process of connecting offline customer and audience data, including first-party records, to digital identifiers for activation, personalization, and measurement. Experian supports onboarding through first-party and third-party solutions.
First-party onboarding through Experian Audience Engine lets brands upload and match their customer data to our identity graph to build and activate audiences across digital channels. Experian Third-Party Onboarding enables data providers, publishers, and commerce media networks to distribute and monetize audiences across programmatic, social, and TV channels.
Both approaches are powered by our data and identity foundation, which enables accurate, privacy-safe matching of offline and digital identifiers.
The difference between first- and third-party onboarding is the relationship between the data provider, the audience, and the party activating it. First-party onboarding means a brand is activating its own customer information, while third-party onboarding means a data provider is making audiences available for use by outside advertisers or partners.
First-party onboarding becomes third-party onboarding most often in CMNs or commerce media. When a retailer monetizes its first-party shopper data for use by CPGs or advertisers, the use case shifts to third-party onboarding.
First-party onboarding allows brands to activate their own customer data, while third-party onboarding helps data providers distribute and monetize audiences so outside advertisers can access them. Retailers and commerce media networks may use both models when they market to their own customers and make audiences available to partners.
Latest posts
Experian Marketing Services and Data Quality President Genevieve Juillard recently sat down with Zach Rodgers, host of the AdExchanger Talks podcast to discuss the future of identity, the importance of data transparency and privacy, and our recent acquisition of Tapad. Genevieve focused on the opportunity for our industry to reimagine an advertising ecosystem that is resilient and adaptable; one that takes advantage of emerging data and prioritizes data transparency and consumer privacy. She also discussed the importance of advertising strategies that put consumers at the heart of every decision and give them more control over their data. Genevieve shared with AdExchanger that Experian’s acquisition of Tapad, a global leader in digital identity resolution, was a natural fit for our company. Tapad’s approach and role in the ecosystem is very much aligned with Experian’s, which is to develop solutions that are resilient to industry and consumer changes. The combination of our capabilities supports interoperability across all types of identifiers, both online and offline, and will position us to help our clients navigate the post-third-party cookie world. To learn more about Experian’s plans to support an effective advertising ecosystem that will evolve with our dynamic industry, listen to the full podcast Embracing ‘Healthy Fragmentation’ In Ad Tech, With Genevieve Juillard. Get in touch
It’s been over a year since Google announced they’d be deprecating the third-party cookie and in that time there’s been a major focus on two types of cookieless identity solutions. Identity vendors and marketers are strategizing which of these two future solutions best fits their needs so they can achieve privacy-safe scale once third-party cookies are no longer available for use on Chrome. Let’s break down these solutions and the considerations marketers need to take into account when deciding what partners to move forward with in the future of identity resolution. Authenticated Traffic Solutions Authenticated traffic solutions (ATS) are a type of digital identification that asks the end-user to identify themselves via personal information, most commonly email address. Often, you’ll see self-authentication at the point of entry to a website that asks you to create an account or login immediately to access the content you are seeking. E-commerce sites use authentication to keep track of consumer purchases and inform advertising decisions for that customer; and publishers use it to tailor featured content, or, more importantly for this discussion, leverage it within the ad ecosystem for targeting. While authentication can provide very valuable user data for audience segmenting and targeting, it can be limited in scale for a single publisher to leverage and monetize on their own. That’s why some identity vendors have worked to integrate themselves within as many publisher authentication modules as possible, so that they can create an aggregate of scale for the ad ecosystem to tap into. But, even this isn’t going to deliver the reach marketers truly thirst for. Alternatively, Facebook has the scale for authenticated traffic, but they keep their data inside a walled garden, so the utility of those authenticated users is only valuable within the Facebook ecosystem. So how can authenticated traffic solutions increase scale to broaden the scope of identifiers they can collect and leverage? Hint: a few of the biggest players have already figured it out. It’s the single sign-on. Google is probably the largest purveyor of a single-sign on solution that can directly impact advertising capabilities. Can you think of a site you visit that doesn’t offer a sign-in with your existing Google account? It’s a short list. Google has integrated themselves into so many applications and publishers that “Login with Gmail” is just second nature (you pictured the Gmail logo when you read that, didn’t you?). Now, if you’re about to purchase something you found off an Instagram ad, or perhaps a retailer you buy from regularly, you’ve probably noticed options to proceed with your checkout via “Amazon pay” or “Apple pay”. These are also single-sign ons. You’re authenticating yourself through Amazon or Apple to that retailer in exchange for A- the safety and security that Amazon or Apple provide for your financial information and B- skipping the annoying process of manually entering personal information over and over again at point of sale. It’s starting to sound like there’s a lot of authenticated data out there isn’t it? Well, that’s true, but again, Amazon and Apple are walled gardens. Amazon is working diligently to build out their own ecosystem to leverage their content and retail channel data for a holistic offering. And Apple keeps user data very close to the chest, constantly limiting its utility for themselves and advertisers. So what is identity resolution doing about it? The Trade Desk announced their solution; Unified ID 2.0, which promises to leverage email authenticated identity for a truly scaled solution for publishers via Javascript through Prebid. By handing over UID2.0 to an independent unbiased organization like Prebid, The Trade Desk is creating instant scale and trust in their solution. Unauthenticated Traffic Solutions Unlike ATS, unauthenticated traffic solutions do not rely on a log-in to identify a user, but they also don’t rely on third-party cookies. Instead, unauthenticated solutions (UATS) leverage their existing streams of real-time data through Javascript on publisher sites or an SDK (software development kit used by apps). The type of information UATS solutions can collect via Javascript or SDK vary, but it can include IP address, user agent and device level info. But being able to read this information at the point of entry to a website does not make a quality identifier. The best unauthenticated solutions will have the ability to set or ingest this information into a unique ID through an infrastructure with incredibly fast speed that can process trillions of anonymous data signals across multiple channels and devices. And even more so, be able to interpret those signals into a profile using machine learning– all at the moment a user enters a domain. It sounds complicated because it is, but it also has a lot of potential. The identity space cannot rest solely on authenticated traffic solutions, because, as you can see, it could limit ownership and operability to just a few power players/walled gardens. This doesn’t help the larger ecosystem monetize and personalize ad inventory. The right unauthenticated solution, however, can unify cross-device individuals and households at scale, because they’re integrated on the broadest number of publishers/SDKs across platforms, have the best algorithms to build confident connections between identifiers, and are universally transactable across the most common sell and demand side platforms. Think of it as the perfect partner- speaking a common language that everyone in the ecosystem understands and acts on. Today more than twenty cookieless identifiers are available in market for the ad ecosystem, and Google hasn’t even announced a date of deprecation. It’s important to be on the lookout for differentiators like scale and precision. Most importantly, choosing a truly cross-device partner will be key, especially as more digital devices and IDs grow in adoption, like CTV has this past year. Taking advantage of both What we will come to find, once the third-party cookie is obsolete, is that choosing just one of these solution types, or partners, will be a disadvantage. The more the industry comes together to collaborate on solutions, the more apparent it is that both of them have value, and thus employing both solutions will give marketers the best opportunities. Tapad, now part of Experian, recently announced the launch of Switchboard; a module within our identity solution; The Tapad Graph, to create this agnostic interoperability for identifiers of all types, and choice and control for the ad tech vendors and marketers who want them. By instantly creating the ability to partner with multiple solutions, Tapad + Experian is ensuring that all use cases for the third-party cookie live on in our cookieless future. Get in touch
Tapad launches global privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, will connect emerging cookieless identifiers to traditional IDs, creating a more holistic view of the consumer and driving value exchange within the advertising ecosystem Tapad, part of Experian, a global leader in cross-device digital identity resolution, and a part of Experian, announced today the launch of Switchboard, a first-of-its-kind solution to help navigate the evolving cookieless landscape. Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, will operate as a global, privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies by connecting new cookieless identifiers to traditional digital IDs for a comprehensive view of consumers and their digital touchpoints. Switchboard will enable interoperability across the growing number of these digital identifiers and the value exchange between publishers, content creators and consumers. Leading digital identity solutions partnering with Tapad, part of Experian at the launch of Switchboard include Unified ID 2.0, ID5, Lotame Panorama ID, BritePool, Retargetly IDx and Audigent Halo ID. Tapad, part of Experian plans to expand support to additional identity solutions on an ongoing basis. In addition to these identity solutions, early partners across the ecosystem include The Trade Desk, Amobee, Martin, ShareThis, Eyeota and Catalina. “This diverse group of launch partners and testing customers will prove that Switchboard is an important tenet for the future of identity resolution. We’re excited to be proactive in our approach to give marketers time to adapt new solutions and test their function in tandem with the third-party cookie, while continuing to give our customers flexibility and control,” said Mark Connon, General Manager of Tapad, part of Experian. “Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5’s cookieless IDs will be available to a wider audience of brands and agencies and enable them to run effective, data-driven campaigns beyond the third-party cookie,” said Mathieu Roche Co-founder & CEO of ID5. Switchboard provides value across the marketing and advertising ecosystem as the need for the ability to support multiple cookieless ID’s across ad tech increases throughout 2021. With a decade of expertise creating digital identity resolution products, Tapad, part of Experian is poised to solve this challenge through innovation and quality, privacy-safe data-driven solutions. “Interoperability is paramount for brand marketers, agencies, publishers and platforms if we want to support an open and free Internet and break free of the stranglehold of walled gardens,” said Pierre Diennet, Global Partnerships at Lotame. ”Lotame Panorama ID’s participation in Switchboard reflects our steadfast commitment to collaborating across and within the industry and providing value to all of its players.” “As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, part of Experian on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers,” says Bryan Everett, Senior Vice President of Global Business Development at Amobee. “With the imminent loss of cookies, advertisers must think creatively in order to respectfully engage consumers in a privacy-compliant way and Switchboard can play an important role in addressing their respective identity needs.” Tapad, part of Experian is welcoming identity solutions and Tapad Graph customer participation in Switchboard throughout 2021. Stayed tuned for more updates and information on Switchboard in the coming months. Get in touch