At A Glance
Market segmentation divides audiences into groups based on shared characteristics to improve targeting, personalization, and marketing ROI. The four primary methods are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic segmentation. The strongest strategies combine multiple segmentation methods, and Experian can help marketers build, activate, and measure audience segments at scale.In this article…
Marketing without segmentation is a lot like shouting into a crowded room and hoping the right person hears you. Without a clear way to communicate in a noisy marketing environment, your message gets lost in the mix.
With segmentation, you can identify your target audience, speak to their needs, and deliver the right message at the right moment. Companies that use segmentation are 130% more likely to understand customer motivations, resulting in more effective campaigns and deeper audience relationships.
In this article, we’ll break down four of the most effective customer segmentation methods, when to use each, and how Experian’s audience solutions can help.
What is market segmentation?
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad audience into distinct groups that share similar traits, like demographics, location, behavior, or firmographic characteristics. Knowing what makes each group unique, you can deliver more relevant messaging and offers through the right channels, optimize spend, and improve outcomes across the full marketing lifecycle.
The four primary marketing segmentation methods are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic. Each offers a unique lens into your audience and is best suited for different marketing goals. The most effective strategies often combine multiple segmentation methods to create a more complete view of the customer.
Why should marketers segment their audiences?
Audience segmentation helps marketers reach the right people with the right message at the right time, improving personalization, campaign performance, and marketing ROI at scale. Far from being just a targeting tactic, market segmentation is a strategic input that shapes how brands plan, communicate, activate, and measure across channels.
Here’s why you should invest your time and marketing budget in honing your audience segments.
Maximize your marketing ROI
Nobody wants to waste money talking to the wrong crowd. Using various methods of marketing segmentation, you can focus on those who want to hear from you — and the payoff can be huge. For marketing channels like email, segmentation can drive up to 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns. The more targeted your message, the better the return.
Create a unified omnichannel strategy
Segmentation helps ensure that every channel, from email and social media to display, SMS, and direct mail, operates from the same playbook.
Once you define your target audience segments, you also need a trusted identity partner to sync them across platforms and environments. This ensures you can deliver consistent, personalized experiences at every touchpoint and your audience receives the same message in the proper context, regardless of where they engage.
Strengthen customer loyalty
Roughly 75% of consumers are loyal to brands that “get” them. When you strive to understand your customers, they’re more likely to stay. Segmentation enables you to personalize communications based on your target segment’s values, behaviors, or preferences, encouraging repeat business.
Expand into new markets
With segmentation, you can analyze existing customers to identify common traits and use that data to pinpoint similar groups in new regions or markets. For example, if your top customers are middle-class parents in suburban areas, you can target lookalike segments in other cities with tailored messaging.
This makes it easier to expand with confidence, knowing you’re reaching people who are more likely to convert.
Lower customer acquisition costs
Rather than forcing you to cast a wide net, segmentation enables you to focus your budget on high-potential audiences across channels, reduce acquisition costs, and minimize wasted spend on low-intent audiences.
Four market segmentation methods and examples
Each market segmentation method reveals something specific about your audience: who they are, where they live, how they behave, or what type of organization they represent. Understanding these dimensions helps you carry out more relevant campaigns, improve targeting accuracy, and uncover new growth opportunities.
While each method can be powerful on its own, the most effective segmentation strategies combine multiple approaches to create a more complete, actionable view of the customer. For example, you might combine demographic and behavioral data to identify high-income households actively researching a particular product category.
Experian supports all four segmentation methods through Marketing Attributes, Mosaic, syndicated audiences, and custom audience solutions. With interoperable data and activation across the broader marketing ecosystem, you can build audience segments once and put them to work across channels.
| Segmentation method | Insight | Best for | Example |
| Demographic | Who your audience is | Consumer targeting, personalization | High-income households |
| Geographic | Where they are | Local campaigns, regional offers | Southwest homeowners |
| Behavioral | What they do | Retention, loyalty, conversion | Frequent online shoppers |
| Firmographic | What business they represent | ABM, B2B marketing | Mid-market healthcare companies |
Let’s take a closer look at each method and when to use it, with real-world examples of market segmentation to help you apply it.
1. Demographic segmentation
Demographic segmentation groups your audience by age, income, gender, education, occupation, marital status, and household composition. It’s the most widely used market segmentation method because it’s accessible, scalable, and data-rich — often closely tied to consumer needs, preferences, and purchasing behavior.
Demographic data makes it easier to tailor your messaging, offers, and channel strategy from the start. And when you combine demographic segmentation with other methods, such as behavioral or geographic segmentation, you can create an even richer view of your audience.
Experian Marketing Attributes, a consumer data resource containing thousands of demographic, behavioral, financial, and lifestyle attributes, provides one of the industry’s most comprehensive demographic data sets, helping you identify, understand, and reach your most valuable audiences.
When to use demographic segmentation
Use demographic segmentation when your product or service is clearly more relevant to people in a specific life stage, income bracket, or household type.
Among all methods of market segmentation, demographic data is often the easiest starting point. It’s especially effective for industries such as financial services, healthcare, education, retail, and others, where consumer needs change based on demographics.
Demographic segmentation examples
As a real-world example, a health supplement company used Experian data to segment its ambassador program audience into four demographic groups based on lifestyle and household makeup. These included younger singles, value-seeking families, high-income spenders, and older empty nesters.
Applying these insights at registration allowed the brand to deliver personalized, channel-specific communications that boosted acquisition and retention. The approach led to stronger engagement and more meaningful customer connections.
2. Geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation categorizes people by location, including country, region, state, city, ZIP code, or even climate. It’s a simple yet effective way to tailor your marketing, as location often influences everything from lifestyle and language to shopping habits and product needs.
Geographic segmentation is especially valuable for regional campaigns, local service businesses, and brands with location-specific products or promotions. Whether you’re promoting snow boots in Colorado or sunscreen in California, geographic segmentation helps you stay relevant to the local context.
Mosaic, our consumer lifestyle segmentation framework, groups U.S. households based on shared demographic, behavioral, financial, and geographic characteristics. It enhances geographic targeting by segmenting U.S. consumers at the ZIP+4 level, helping you uncover meaningful differences between neighborhoods and reach audiences more accurately.
When to use geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation is ideal when your offer or message changes depending on climate, culture, availability, or local regulations. It’s also helpful for planning market expansion or testing the performance of different methods of market segmentation across regions. Geographic segmentation is also valuable for regulated industries, such as utilities, where service territories and regional customer needs vary significantly.
Geographic segmentation examples
One home furnishings retailer partnered with Experian to understand how customer needs varied across store locations. Using a mix of client data and Experian demographics, we segmented stores based on their surrounding customer base, like urban, white-collar shoppers in metro centers versus lower-income households in more remote cities.
These insights enabled the retailer to tailor inventory, marketing strategies, and ad copy for each store type, resulting in more relevant customer experiences.
3. Behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation centers on how people live their lives — their interests, habits, and decision-making patterns. It includes factors like past purchases, brand engagement, engagement frequency, loyalty status, product usage, browsing patterns, and responsiveness to offers and promotions.
Among all of the segmentation methods, this one provides insight into intent, helping you go beyond who your audience is to understand what they do. You can use behavioral insights to re-engage former customers with relevant offers, reward loyal buyers with personalized perks, or guide high-intent shoppers toward conversion with timely nudges, and measure performance across the customer lifecycle.
Behavioral segmentation is most powerful when combined with demographic data, giving you a better picture of both who their customers are and how they engage. We help connect behavioral signals to consumer profiles, enabling richer targeting and more accurate segment definition.
When to use behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is best when you want to personalize based on intent, habits, or engagement stage. It’s particularly useful for retention, reactivation, or cross-selling strategies.
Behavioral segmentation examples
In practice, a national big-box retailer partnered with Experian to better understand customer behavior during grocery store visits. The goal was to identify distinct “trip missions” that could drive category trial and increase basket size. We analyzed everything from basket contents to customer composition and segmented visits into 11 unique missions.
For example, the “All Aisles Online” segment represented large households (often homeowners with families) stocking up on household staples through online orders. In contrast, the “Marketable Mission” segment captured smaller, likely renter households making quick trips for non-essentials.
These behavioral insights empowered retail marketers to adjust promotions based on the intent behind each visit, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth. This type of analysis is increasingly important as purchase journeys become more fragmented across retailers, channels, and shopping occasions.
4. Firmographic segmentation (B2B)
Firmographic segmentation is like demographic segmentation for businesses. It groups B2B audiences based on attributes such as annual revenue, location, company size, industry, and organizational structure. You can also segment by job title or decision-maker role to better target key stakeholders.
This method is essential for account-based marketing (ABM), enterprise targeting, and aligning your messaging, sales strategy, or product offerings with the unique needs of different business types. A startup in the tech sector will likely respond to a very different pitch than an enterprise manufacturer, and firmographic data helps you speak to both more accurately.
Our business data assets help B2B marketers build and activate firmographic segments at scale, so you can easily identify high-value accounts, prioritize outreach, and uncover growth opportunities across the customer lifecycle.
When to use firmographic segmentation
Use firmographic segmentation when marketing to other businesses, especially when your product or service has different benefits depending on business size or sector.
Firmographic segmentation examples
A B2B client partnered with Experian to gain a deeper understanding of the revenue potential of their existing business customers. Using firmographic data, we segmented the client’s customers into distinct groups based on the characteristics most strongly tied to spending behavior.
For each segment, we calculated potential spend, defined as the 80th percentile of annual spend within that segment. This allowed the client to identify high-value accounts with untapped growth potential.
For example, one customer, ABC Construction, had spent $4,750. But based on their segment’s profile, their annual potential was $9,000. That insight revealed a $4,250 opportunity to deepen the relationship through more targeted marketing and sales efforts.
How to choose the right segmentation method
Different marketing goals call for different segmentation approaches. Use the table below as a starting point when deciding which method to prioritize.
| Goal | Recommended segmentation method |
| Personalization | Demographic + behavioral |
| Local campaigns | Geographic |
| Customer retention | Behavioral |
| ABM | Firmographic |
| New market expansion | Geographic + demographic |
Best practices for market segmentation
Effective market segmentation is only as powerful as the data, insights, and activation strategy powering it. Whether you’re using demographic, geographic, behavioral, or firmographic segmentation, the following best practices will help you maximize performance and build more actionable audience segments.
Start with clean, reliable data
Segments are only as good as the data behind them. If your data is outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete, your segments can lead to ineffective targeting, wasted spend, and missed opportunities. That’s why the first step in any segmentation strategy is building on accurate, compliant, continuously refreshed data.
Just as important, you need data that provides a neutral foundation for audience strategy. The best segmentation data isn’t tied to a single platform or ecosystem; it should give you the flexibility to build audiences once and activate them wherever your campaigns run.
Experian Marketing Data is sourced, verified, and refreshed continuously to help you develop more reliable audience segments. As an independent data provider, we help brands operationalize data across the broader marketing ecosystem with neutrality, flexibility, and interoperability at the center of our approach.
Experian data remains available across major platforms and marketplaces, enabling you to activate audiences, connect identity, and measure performance across channels. As AI-powered marketing and automation continue to evolve, trusted identity and interoperable data are increasingly important for creating consistent audience strategies from insight to activation.
Test and refine segments continuously
Business goals, market conditions, and behaviors are constantly changing. What worked last month or even last week might not work today. By adjusting your segments over time, you make sure your marketing stays relevant, focused, and effective.
The most successful marketers treat segments as living models rather than static lists. Segmentation is an ongoing process of defining audiences, activating campaigns, measuring performance, and optimizing based on what you learn. Use A/B testing, performance metrics, and audience analytics to iterate on your segments and improve results over time.
We support ongoing segment validation through our measurement and analytics solutions, helping you connect audience strategy to campaign outcomes and close the loop between audience definition and performance.
Align segments with personalized messaging and offers
Each segment has distinct needs, preferences, and motivations, which means generic messaging won’t resonate effectively. A segment is only as valuable as your ability to translate those insights into messaging, offers, and experiences that reflect what that audience cares about.
Once you’ve built your segments, personalize your creative, copy, and offers to appeal to each group and increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions. Our consumer insights help you understand not only who to target, but also what messages are most likely to resonate and which channels are most effective for reaching those people.
Integrate segmentation across all platforms
If someone sees one message in an email and a completely different one in an ad or on your website, it creates confusion and weakens trust. Siloed segmentation strategies that only apply to a single channel can create disconnected customer experiences and undermine omnichannel performance.
From CRMs and email platforms to ad tech and analytics tools, make sure your segmentation method is applied consistently across every channel to improve performance and build a cohesive brand experience.
Our audience segments are designed for cross-platform activation, helping you reach the same people across digital advertising, direct mail, CRM, social, TV, and other channels with greater consistency and accuracy.
Segment your audiences with Experian
Effective audience segmentation is at the heart of every successful marketing strategy, but in this fragmented, privacy-conscious landscape, grouping your audience into meaningful, actionable subgroups is more challenging than ever. That’s where we come in.
With coverage of the entire U.S. population, we help you define and categorize broad audiences into precise segments using rich data on demographics, behaviors, financial profiles, and lifestyle traits. These insights make it easier to personalize messaging, optimize media spend, and drive better outcomes. Whether you’re building segments from scratch or enriching existing customer data, we provide the data infrastructure to make marketing segmentation actionable at scale.
From ready-to-use syndicated audiences to custom segments and even Contextually-Indexed Audiences that align targeting with content, we offer flexible segmentation solutions that perform across digital, TV, programmatic, and social channels.
In our most recent release, we introduced over 430 new and updated audience segments across key categories, helping you reach consumers with even greater accuracy than before:
- 119 new automotive audiences covering EV ownership, in-market shoppers, brand switchers, certified pre-owned buyers, and used vehicle purchase intent
- 31 new financial audiences spanning generational life stages, spending capacity, investment readiness, liquidity, and borrowing intent
- 89 new Mosaic audiences, including 19 lifestyle Groups and 70 detailed Types built on the latest Mosaic V8 framework
- 10 new travel audiences focused on cruise shopper behavior, brand affinity, and travel intent
- 9 new lifestyle and interest audiences covering TV viewership behaviors and AI-engaged consumers
- 180 refreshed audience segments with improved naming conventions designed to enhance discoverability across platforms and AI-powered tools
Together, these segments give marketers more accuracy to reach high-intent consumers based on real-world behaviors, spending patterns, and financial capacity.
Talk to our team about your segmentation methods today
Frequently asked questions about market segmentation
A market segment is a distinct subgroup of consumers or businesses that share common characteristics and are likely to respond similarly to a marketing message, offer, or experience. Market segments can be defined by factors such as age, location, purchasing behavior, company size, or industry.
A good market segment is measurable, reachable, distinct, actionable, and large enough to be meaningful. In other words, you should be able to identify the segment, reach it through marketing channels, understand how it differs from other audiences, and develop strategies tailored to its needs.
The most effective market segments provide straightforward opportunities for personalization, targeting, and business growth.
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad audience into smaller groups based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, geography, behaviors, or firmographics, to help you deliver more relevant messaging, improve targeting efficacy, and create more personalized customer experiences.
The four types of market segmentation are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic segmentation. Each reveals a different dimension of your audience and is best suited for different marketing objectives. Many marketers combine multiple segmentation methods to build a more complete view of their customers and improve campaign performance.
Market segmentation examples include a retailer targeting high-income households with premium product offerings, a B2B company segmenting prospects by company size and industry, or a national brand tailoring messaging and promotions by region using geographic segmentation.
The right segmentation method depends on your marketing goals and the audience insights you need. Use demographic segmentation to understand who your audience is, geographic segmentation to understand where they are, behavioral segmentation to understand how they engage, and firmographic segmentation to target businesses based on organizational characteristics.
Yes, you can absolutely combine segmentation methods. In fact, combining multiple segmentation methods often produces more accurate and actionable audience insights. Many marketers use demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic data to create a more complete view of their audience and improve campaign performance.
We support market segmentation through comprehensive demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic data solutions. Using Marketing Attributes, Mosaic, syndicated audiences, and custom targeting solutions, you can build, activate, and measure audience segments across channels.
All solutions are powered by privacy-conscious, continuously refreshed data designed to help brands reach the right audiences with greater accuracy and confidence.
Latest posts
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
Featured storiesTapad 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
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