At A Glance
Experian introduces a solution for commerce media networks (CMNs) that connects first-party shopper data with trusted identity, audience, activation, and measurement capabilities. Brands gain deeper shopper insight, broader off-site reach, and closed-loop measurement across channels, with a clear path to incremental media revenue.Experian is introducing a solution designed specifically for commerce media networks (CMNs) to capture more advertising revenue. This solution connects brands’ first-party shopper data, combining it with Experian’s #1 ranked identity and audience services. Together, these capabilities help CMNs gain deeper customer insight, build richer audiences for activation, extend reach outside of their owned and operated inventory, and run real-time measurement and attribution.
Why are commerce media networks investing in audience and identity solutions?
CMNs now play a central role in how brands reach high-intent shoppers. CMNs are expected to offer more than on-site placements. Advertisers want broader reach, consistent targeting, and proof of performance. Experian’s solution is built to address those expectations by helping CMNs turn common challenges, including limited audience visibility and reach, and growing demand for programmatic access, into revenue opportunities. By working with Experian, CMNs can better understand their customers, extend reach beyond owned platforms, and show return on ad spend as shoppers move from ad exposure to purchase.
How does Experian help commerce media networks grow media revenue?
As commerce media continues to expand, success depends on understanding shoppers and monetizing that knowledge responsibly. Experian’s solution supports CMNs across identity, audience development, activation, and measurement, with benefits designed to support growth.
Identity resolution
Every CMN captures authenticated first-party data, whether collected online or offline. On its own, that data represents only a portion of a customer or household’s addressable footprint. By connecting to Experian’s identity graphs, CMNs gain a broader view of their customers across offline and digital environments, supported by coverage across 126 million households, 250 million individuals, and 4.2 billion digital IDs.
Expanded insights
Understanding shoppers at scale is critical for commerce media networks looking to differentiate their offerings and grow media revenue. Beyond data hygiene, Experian enables CMNs to build customer profiles that go deeper than purchase behavior alone, incorporating demographics, lifestyle attributes, TrueTouchSM, Mosaic® USA, and more.
These insights help CMNs better understand who their audiences are, identify high-value segments, and create unique, differentiated audiences at scale. By offering brands a clearer view into shopper behavior and intent, CMNs can attract the right brand partners, support more effective activation strategies, and position their network as a premium destination for commerce media investment.
Create audiences
CMNs can enrich first-party data with Experian Marketing Data to build custom segments for advertisers. With more than 5,000 Marketing Attributes available, CMNs can help advertisers reach first-party audiences enhanced with data based on demographics, media preferences, and behavioral signals.
Maximize reach and distribution
Experian’s Third-Party Onboarding capabilities allow CMNs to move audiences from owned platforms into programmatic, television, and social channels. Through Experian’s network of more than 20 platforms, including The Trade Desk and Magnite, CMNs can extend audience reach and create new monetization opportunities. Self-service tools, native integrations, and transparent pricing support efficient activation.
Through Experian’s Curated Deals, CMNs can make their data usable in private marketplaces (PMPs), offering unique data for advertisers to build their PMPs. This helps advertisers obtain more reach, achieve their intended outcomes,and offers CMNs another way to monetize their data.
Demonstrate success
CMNs need clear, trusted measurement to support advertiser investment. Experian’s Activity Feed empowers CMNs to run attribution, so they can show their clients the impact their data delivered. It does this by connecting ad exposures and consumer touchpoints across environments, including web and connected TV (CTV), to households and individuals, making the link between ad exposure and consumer action clear.
Case study: How Experian enhanced addressability for a leading retail media network
A leading RMN has worked with Experian since 2021 to better understand its customers, organize first-party shopper data, and activate audiences across the digital ecosystem. Experian supported this RMN in reducing reliance on third-party cookies by anchoring shopper data to more stable digital identifiers, including mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), hashed emails (HEMs), CTV IDs, and Unified ID 2.0 (UID2).
As a result, addressability across owned platforms and programmatic channels increased by nearly 300%. This improvement supported more consistent reach and measurement throughout the shopper journey.
“Accurate data is the backbone of effective commerce media strategies, and Experian’s top-tier data solutions are critical for precise targeting and audience delivery. Experian’s advanced capabilities in data onboarding, customer audiences, and robust identity graphs allow advertisers to seamlessly reach the right audiences.”
NexChatper IncArt Sebastian, CEO
What value does Experian bring to commerce media networks?
Experian supports CMNs with a combination of identity, data quality, and ecosystem connectivity.
How can commerce media networks partner with Experian?
Experian’s data and identity solutions help commerce media networks make the most of their opportunity. By connecting shopper insight to activation and measurement, CMNs can strengthen advertiser relationships and grow revenue.
Connect with a member of our team to learn how Experian can support your commerce media strategy.
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FAQs
Experian’s solution for CMNs connects first-party shopper data with identity, audience, activation, and measurement capabilities. Commerce media networks use it to expand reach, support advertisers, and measure outcomes across channels.
Identity supports commerce media performance by connecting shopper data across devices, channels, and environments. This connection supports consistent targeting, broader reach, and measurement tied to real purchases.
Yes. Experian enables activation across programmatic, television, and social platforms through Third-Party Onboarding, direct platform integrations, and Curated Deals through PMPs.
Experian supports closed-loop measurement for commerce media networks through Activity Feed. Activity Feed links exposures and online actions to households and individuals, enabling CMNs to easily run attribution. With Activity Feed, commerce media networks can show how media contributes to shopper behavior and sales.
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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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