Back-to-school season remains one of the biggest retail moments of the year—and 2025 is expected to follow suit. Total spending is projected to reach $84.51 billion, with K–12 shoppers alone contributing nearly $50 billion—59% of the total. E-commerce will also play a major role, accounting for 37.4% of total back-to-school sales.
However, 2025 shoppers may be facing even higher costs due to the incoming tariffs with everything from laptops and lunchboxes to kids’ clothing and crayons becoming more expensive. In anticipation of these rising prices, shoppers might once again start early to score deals. Last year, 55% of back-to-school and college shoppers had already started buying items in July for the upcoming school year. This early start coincided with major July promotions like Amazon Prime Day, in which U.S. shoppers spent a record $14.2 billion online, where school-related purchases surged by over 200%.
Whether you’re marketing school essentials or offering services to help students succeed, it’s easy to default to the same go-to audiences. This blog post highlights overlooked back-to-school segments to help you build personalized back-to-school strategies that resonate with students, parents, and educators. You can find the complete audience segment names in the appendix.
School the competition: How Experian can help you connect with 2025 shoppers
With summer just around the corner, back-to-school might not be top of mind, but there’s no better time to start planning. Whether you’re reaching parents, students, or educators, Experian’s syndicated audiences can help ensure your marketing messages make the honor roll by landing with the right people at the right time.
- Experian’s 2,400+ syndicated audiences are available directly on over 30 leading television, social, programmatic advertising platforms, and directly within Audigent for activation within private marketplaces (PMPs).
- Reach consumers based on who they are, where they live, and their household makeup. Experian ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset for key back-to-school attributes such as Presence of Children.
- Access to unique audiences through Experian’s Partner Audiences available on Experian’s data marketplace, within Audigent for activation in PMPs, and directly on platforms like DirectTV, Dish, Magnite, OpenAP, and The Trade Desk.
Meet your overlooked back-to-school audiences
Back-to-school shoppers aren’t one-size-fits-all. From parents prepping supply lists to students outfitting dorms, reaching the right audience is key to making the grade with your campaign.
Let’s go beyond the basics. Here are four back-to-school audience categories you can target with Experian:
- New year, new gear-ers
- Weeknight TV watchers
- Parenting personas
- School-season meal planners
Let’s open our notebooks and break down the audience segments within each group. Whether your customers are buying backpacks, stocking the fridge, or searching for school essentials, these insights will help your campaign pass with flying colors.
New year, new gear-er
From teens picking out their first-day outfit to college students stocking up for dorm life, these audiences represent a wide range of priorities, needs, and spending behaviors. They’re also heavily influenced by trends, technology, and value-driven purchases.
Don’t overlook these five high-potential audiences in your strategy:
- Big-Box Electronics Stores: High Spenders
- Amazon Frequent Spenders
- Department Store Deal Shoppers In Store Spenders
- Teen Apparel (Clothing): Online and In Store High Spenders
- Dell Computer and Apple Mac Purchaser
Weeknight TV watchers
Back-to-school season is also back-to-routine season. Families are gathering for more shared TV time in the evenings—especially in August and September. This makes co-viewing households a prime audience for messaging tied to school-year prep.
Rethink your back-to-school approach with these five overlooked segments:
- Co-Watchers
- Co-Watchers with Children
- Cord Cutters: Recent
- Engagement Channel Preference: Streaming TV
- Digital Video
Parenting personas
Targeting by household structure helps tailor messaging to the right family dynamic—whether it’s parents with toddlers or households with college students.
Four audiences you might be missing this back-to-school season:
- Digital Moms and Dads
- Sports Utility Families
- Colleges and Cafes
- Kids and Cabernet
School-season meal planners
Food and grocery shopping routines shift during the school season. These audiences are ideal for promotions tied to lunch prep, after-school snacks, and weeknight meals.
Add these four under-the-radar audiences for back-to-school success:
- Online Grocery Delivery Services: High Spenders
- Grocery Stores: High Spenders
- Fast Food/QSR Frequent Spenders
- Fast Food/QSR Pizza Frequent Spenders
Core back-to-school shoppers
Of course, you’ll want to add traditional back-to-school audiences to your strategy. These audiences are highly engaged and often the decision-makers, making them ideal for marketers looking to drive purchase intent early and often.
Here are four key back-to-school audiences you can target–all are available by life stage to reach PreK, elementary, middle, and high school households:
- Back to School Supplies
- Back to School Moderate Spend
- Back to School High Spend
- Back to School Apparel
Make the grade with Experian this back-to-school season
As marketers gear up for the back-to-school season, it’s the perfect time to sharpen your strategy and connect with back-to-school shoppers. Whether you’re building tried-and-true segments or exploring more unexpected, high-potential groups you might have not considered, Experian can help you reach the right audience. If you’re looking to create targeted segments for activation across digital and TV or gain insights to guide your campaign planning, Experian has you covered.
Need a custom audience? Reach out to our audience team and we can help you build and activate an Experian audience on the platform of your choice. Additionally, work with Experian’s network of data providers to build audiences and send to an Audigent PMP for activation.
You can activate our syndicated audiences on-the-shelf of most major platforms. For a full list of Experian’s syndicated audiences and activation destinations, download our syndicated audiences guide.
Explore our other seasonal audiences that you can activate today.
Activate back-to-school audiences today with Audigent
Ready to ace your back-to-school campaigns? Audigent will build customized deals that combine premium Experian syndicated or Partner Audiences and inventory into a single, streamlined deal ID – tailored to your campaign needs. Plus, our powerful supply-side optimization ensures your campaigns deliver top marks in performance.
Connect with the Audigent team today at AudigentAgency_Brands@experian.com to get a head-start on back-to-school success.
Contact us
Latest posts
Partnership combines customer connections and cross-device scale to deliver more strategic customer insights NEW YORK AND CHICAGO — March 16, 2017 – Signal, the global leader in customer identity, today announced a partnership with Tapad, now part of Experian and the leading provider of unified, cross-screen marketing technology solutions. This global integration extends device connectivity for Signal’s clients across North America, APAC and EMEA by leveraging Tapad’s proprietary Device GraphTM. With Signal’s Customer Identity Solution, brands benefit from more visibility of known customers, lower costs to reach those customers and decreased expenses and data loss that often results from using multiple vendors. Integrating with Tapad’s Device Graph, which connects billions of devices, enables Signal clients to build an even broader view of their known customers across multiple devices. This integration combines Signal’s customer identity scale with Tapad’s device scale to expand the reach of addressable media channels and enhance customer journey insights across touchpoints. Tapad and Signal were able to drive incremental device connections for more than 65 percent of customer profiles, linking an average of 6.8 browsers and devices per customer. With this combined data set, Signal clients can expand their authenticated view of a customer to all associated devices and realize more strategic insights into their high-value users. The partnership also allows Signal’s clients to integrate in real-time with Tapad’s media platform, Unify. This proprietary technology enables advertisers to make real-time activation and buying decisions with maximum scale, as well as automated reporting and measurement. “Continuously recognizing customers across devices instantly and in a privacy-safe way is essential for marketers to stay competitive,” said Marc Kiven, founder and CRO of Signal. “We are thrilled to enter this unique, global partnership with Tapad, enabling our clients to access their technology and more effectively reach customers in real-time and at scale.” “Being able to leverage a persistent view of customer connections across devices is a huge challenge for brands,” said Pierre Martensson, SVP and GM of Tapad’s global data division. “With Tapad, Signal is now able to connect with the billions of existing data points in our device graph to help clients better understand customer behavior and realize even stronger customer engagement.” Contact us today
Early successes include revenue increases, global partnerships and fundraising NEW YORK, March 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ – Tapad's entrepreneurial mentorship initiative, the Propeller Program, has seen extremely positive results since it began in September 2016. The five early-stage startups selected from Norway have gained momentum in establishing a U.S. presence. Tapad, now a part of Experian, is the leader in unified cross-device marketing technology. The company was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Among the successes within Propeller: Xeneta, the leading ocean freight price comparison platform and contracted rate database, has raised an additional $12M in funding since beginning the Propeller Program. Before the end of 2016, the company had exceeded its revenue expectations by nearly 30 percent, proving the European-focused business could succeed in the American market. "Aside from directly impacting our revenue, the Propeller Program has provided us with incredible access to a countless number of external resources, including subject matter experts from the fields of fundraising, public speaking, corporate structuring and immigration law," said William Di Ieso, GM of North America for Xeneta. "We remain extremely grateful for the opportunity and exposure the program has provided for Xeneta." Bubbly, an in-store real-time engagement tool for non-buyers, now has clients on four continents. After only a few months in the U.S. market, Bubbly has signed deals with one major retail brand, one major toy manufacturer and a major global consulting firm. The Propeller Program has also opened doors for greater opportunities in Scandinavia and EMEA. After an introduction to Telenor Group's President and CEO Sigve Brekke, Bubbly is currently piloting its IoT kiosk with the company. "The mentoring sessions have been very valuable and have given us guidance as to how to best enter the U.S. market," said Marianne Haugland Hindsgaul, Bubbly CEO and co-founder. "Learning to do business in the U.S. is not something you can necessarily learn from a book. The most impactful lessons are based on real-world experience, and that is what the Propeller Program has given us." BylineMe, a marketplace for freelancers, publishers and brands to connect for content creation and distribution services, has built an extensive network of potential clients and investors. The company has tested its product in the U.S. market and gained valuable feedback for further development. Eventum, a property-sharing group that digitally assists in securing venues for meetings and corporate events, has closed a seed round of funding for nearly $1M. Eventum has also made key hires in the areas of business development and engineering "It is so rewarding to be able to support these Norwegian startups in a meaningful way," said Are Traasdahl, CEO and founder at Tapad. "Mentor relationships are critical for strategic growth, and I am proud to be able to pay forward the experiences I have gained as an entrepreneur. To me, the Propeller Program is a shining example of the magic that can happen when Norwegian innovation meets American opportunity." Contact us today
Tapad’s TV analytics solutions now include premium national cable inventory– Travelocity asserts industry need, praises partnership — NEW YORK, February 28, 2017 — Tapad, a part of Experian, has announced its partnership with clypd, the leading audience-based sales platform for television advertising. By integrating clypd’s national cable network inventory, the partnership will expand Tapad’s extensive supply of TV inventory to include premium national cable inventory. Tapad is the leading provider of privacy-safe, cross-screen marketing technology solutions and was first-to-market with a device graph. Clypd’s robust sell-side advertising platform was one of the first built exclusively for the television industry, empowering media owners with solutions that deliver workflow automation, data-enhanced decisioning and, overall, maximize TV campaign performance. Through this partnership, Tapad’s Device Graph-powered TV tools will work in tandem with clypd’s sales platform to enable more precise audience engagement for TV ad buys. This will enable marketers to integrate their customer data or third-party digital segments into Tapad’s TV platform and use them to precisely engage their audience across clypd’s industry-leading footprint of national TV inventory. Campaigns are then optimized using Tapad’s graph-powered TV attribution, ensuring ads are aligned with the best context for each brand’s message. “Clypd is a pioneer in building TV marketplaces,” says Marshall Wong, SVP of TV market development at Tapad. “They were quick to recognize the benefits a device graph could bring to TV so that advertisers can activate linear inventory curated for any digital audience.” “Tapad’s TV activation platform increases the efficiency in which marketers can reach their intended audience on traditional linear TV,” says Doug Hurd, co-founder and EVP of business development at clypd. “Their customized, data-driven campaigns launch with precision and really increase the value marketers can extract from linear TV inventory.” "At Travelocity, we are always looking for ways to more efficiently reach our target audiences,” says Ashley Parker, head of brand marketing at Travelocity. “The combination of traditional linear TV and solutions like this offering from Tapad and clypd are bringing both the tools and the supply to make this vision a reality." Contact us today
Appendix
New year, new gear-ers
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Shopping Behavior > Big-Box Electronics Stores: High Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Shopping Behavior > Big Box and Club Stores: Amazon Frequent Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Shopping Behavior > Department Store In Store Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Apparel > Teen Apparel (Clothing): Online High Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Apparel > Teen Apparel (Clothing): In Store High Spenders
- Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Technology > Dell Computer Model
- Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Technology > Apple Mac Purchaser Model
Weeknight TV watchers
- Television (TV) > Household/Family Viewing > Co-Watchers
- Television (TV) > Household/Family Viewing > Co-Watchers with Children
- Experian > Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Entertainment > Streaming/Video/Audio/CTV/Cable TV: Cable/Broadcast TV: Cord Cutters: Recent
- TrueTouch: Communication Preference > Engagement Channel Preference > Streaming TV
- TrueTouch: Communication Preference > Engagement Channel Preference > Digital Video
Parenting personas
- Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Personas > Digital Moms
- Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Personas > Digital Dads
- Mosaic – Personas – Lifestyle and Interests > Group D: Suburban Style > D15 – Sports Utility Families
- Mosaic – Personas – Lifestyle and Interests > Group O: Singles and Starters > O53 – Colleges and Cafes
- Mosaic – Personas – Lifestyle and Interests > Group A: Power Elite > A03 – Kids and Cabernet
School-season meal planners
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Grocery > Online Grocery Delivery Services: High Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Grocery > Grocery Stores: High Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Fast Food/QSR QSR Frequent Spenders
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants > Fast Food/QSR Pizza Frequent Spenders
Core back-to-school shoppers
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – Elementary School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – Middle School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – High School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – Elementary School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – Middle School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – High School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – Elementary School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – Middle School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – High School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – Elementary School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – Middle School
- Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – High School