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.
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Adapt with Tapad, a part of Experian Leading browsers have made public announcements and technical deployments to reduce the digital advertising accessibility of third-party cookies for data collection, storage, and sharing due to growing privacy concerns. As a result, there has been growing momentum to find an alternative via cookieless IDs, with the intent to create a replacement that helps ensure continuity across the ecosystem. At Tapad we’ve chosen to approach the market with a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for these cookieless identifiers, so that marketers can continue to work with the identity providers of their choice while maintaining the most holistic view of consumers across digital touchpoints. Introducing switchboard Switchboard is a module within The Tapad Graph that leverages our core capabilities across machine learning and identity management to provide a connection between traditional digital identifiers and the new wave of cookieless IDs that will be utilized in the future. Customers of Tapad can take advantage of its broad ecosystem of identifiers to drive targeting and frequency capping strategies and enable detailed measurement and attribution post-deprecation of the third-party cookie. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption, scale, and utility of cookieless IDs with the release of the Switchboard module within The Tapad Graph, while maintaining an agnostic approach to the market. Switchboard for identity solutions In the evolving landscape agencies and marketers will need to invest, test, and analyze the best combination of cookieless ID partners to meet their objectives. The Switchboard module will increase the utility and value of the cookieless ID space in conjunction with other addressable IDs, by providing a layer of connectivity that will be natively missing with the deprecation of third-party cookies. Identity solutions at launch: Switchboard for graph customers For existing Tapad customers who leverage the Switchboard module in The Tapad Graph, it will provide a seamless way to facilitate interoperability while resolving identity back to a Household or Individual. By providing this translation layer, Tapad will take on the responsibility of encryption and decryption protocols where applicable, which will deliver added functionality to our customers. Tapad + Experian partners at launch: Use cases Resolve existing first-party data with new cookieless solutions through The Tapad Graph to minimize data loss Frequency cap at the Individual and Household level via Cookieless and traditional ID Reach consumers at scale across all touchpoints and IDs Build a more inclusive and holistic view of the consumer journey Run accurate and scalable measurement before and after the formal deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome Map online data into offline activities Hear why industry leaders are adapting with Tapad + Experian As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, a part of Experian, on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers. 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. — Bryan Everett | Senior Vice President of Global Business Development | Amobee Connecting offline and online shopper activity in a privacy-compliant way is fundamental to marketing effectiveness and determining return on ad-spend. That’s why we’re excited to be a launch partner for Tapad + Experian’s Switchboard offering; it provides a unified solution for supporting the variety of proprietary and anonymous user ID standards required by advertising demand-side platforms today. — Brian Dunphy | SVP Digital Business and Strategic Partnerships | Catalina As the industry evolves, Tapad + Experian’s Switchboard presents a privacy-safe solution that allows for the continued activation of data and an alternative to advertising within walled garden environments. We look forward to collaborating with Tapad and the industry as we collectively transition to support cookieless identity. — Don Lee |SVP of Global Platform Partnerships | Eyeota We are excited to participate in this proactive solution to the sunset of third-party cookies. Switchboard’s agnostic interoperability, with BritePool and other ID providers, will create high-value for marketers as they transition to the era of cookieless web advertising. — David J. Moore | CEO | BritePool 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. 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. — Pierre Diennet | Global Partnerships | Lotame At this pivotal moment in the industry, we are excited to be partnering with Tapad, a part of Experian on their cookieless initiative and making Retargetly IDx available into the Switchboard solution, providing global brands, platforms and publishers with a compliant, cookieless ID solution for the Latin American market; enabling them to target, reach and measure users at scale through the region. — Daniel Czaplinski | CEO and Co-Founder | Retargetly With Audigent’s Halo ID, we’re architecting a cookieless future where clients and partners have confidence in the actionability and interoperability of exclusive 1st party audiences, originated from some of the world’s leading publishers and creators. We see collaboration as being critical to a collective understanding of identity and Tapad, a part of Experian as a trusted partner with solutions such as Switchboard to support continuity for marketers’ addressability. — Drew Stein | CEO and Founder | Audigent Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5’s cookie-less 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. — Mathieu Roche | CEO and Co-Founder | ID5 Addressing the current identity challenge requires transparency and collaboration. We are pleased to align ShareThis data with Tapad + Experian’s growing ecosystem. ShareThis data helps marketers evolve beyond the cookie to complete the picture. Tapad + Experian’s Switchboard offering will support ShareThis’s deep connections to clients and technology platforms, preserving and growing the accessibility of our data. — Michael Gorman | SVP Product and Business Development | ShareThis Get in touch
With the emergence of email addresses as a currency for brands to communicate with their consumers offline; attaching email data to in-store purchases lays the groundwork for future advertising strategies. However, this advantage in having an additional digital touchpoint also creates a new challenge for marketers. How do they connect what they know about their customers via offline data and PII, or personally identifiable information, with what they want to know about their online behaviors and interactions? Taken a step further, how can they create actionable strategies that connect these two streams of consumer insights in order to drive them to make more future purchases; and even become loyalists? At a time when the shift from traditional to online shopping feels more like a landslide; connecting online and offline data has never been more valuable or more urgent. The solution for these marketers lies in the framework of identity resolution; and a key capability called hashed email onboarding. Hashed email onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers. The methodology prevents the consumers actual email address from being readable; while still providing marketers a connection between those emails and other touchpoints for an individual. Instead of understanding the customer journey in two distinct parts; how they interact with a brand or company offline and separately how they interact with a brand online; hashed email onboarding allows for the two parts to be woven together in a holistic view of that consumer. The power of connecting these data sets can be seen when combining offline and online attribution and measurement to improve frequency capping and look-alike modeling. It’s important to note that not all identity resolution vendors that onboard hashed emails function in the same way or provide the same level of data. Some connect only to desktop or only to mobile devices; while others don’t actually make direct linkages at all- they simply provide the hashed emails as a targetable digital audience for upload. While hashed email onboarding and the connection between offline and online data is a powerful strategy; it needs to be as structured as possible across the most data available to reveal truly efficient targeting and measurement strategies. Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get in touch
To our valued customers and partners, it’s been an exciting week here at Tapad! As announced in a press release this morning, Tapad is now a member of the Experian family. We’re thrilled to continue to grow as a leader in identity resolution under the umbrella of a global expert in data, analytics and technology. Tapad and Experian are deeply connected by our commitment to serving the needs of our customers; and with a focus on quality of the data we provide, we have a common goal for the future of identity in the advertising ecosystem. As part of this announcement, we wanted to assure you, our valued customer, that we remain deeply committed to serving you today just as we always have. Nothing will change in your daily operations with Tapad. Experian immediately recognized that the success and growth of Tapad was directly tied to the strength and depth of its team members. As such, the acquisition will not result in any changes to day-to-day contacts at Tapad, or processes with weekly graph deliveries and other product support. Experian’s faith and investment in Tapad’s future and the future of identity resolution underscores what we’ve always believed our products could achieve and that we will be able to continue serving brands, advertisers, publishers, and the advertising and marketing ecosystem for years to come. On a personal note, I am excited to be transitioning my role as Chief Operating Officer of Tapad to the General Manager position of a global business that’s achieved exponential growth over the past several years; culminating in this strategic acquisition that will no doubt bring even more value to our customers in the future. We remain committed to open communication and welcome any questions you may have. Thank you,Mark Connon | General Manager, Tapad Contact us today