We spend our days surrounded by screens: at work, at home, and everywhere in between. But audio is the one channel that moves with us, from morning routines to evening commutes, from workouts to household chores. More than two-thirds of U.S. consumers will listen to digital audio every month this year, making it one of the fastest-growing ways to connect with audiences. Experian and Audacy are working together to solve the challenges of fragmented listening, cross-platform targeting, and campaign measurement, helping brands reach people in the moments other channels can’t.
Why audio sticks with us
Audio fits into life’s in-between moments, from the commute to the workout to the chores, when other media can’t. Unlike video, it doesn’t demand full attention; it joins the flow of daily routines. This makes audio uniquely personal, creating connections that other formats can’t replicate.
Audacy’s expertise in understanding listener behavior ensures that audio campaigns feel like a natural part of daily life. Experian’s data helps advertisers identify the right audiences, while Audacy ensures the message is delivered at the right time. Together, we help brands create campaigns that resonate deeply with listeners. By meeting audiences in their moments of focus, audio becomes a powerful tool for building meaningful and lasting connections.
“Audio is a companion in people’s daily rituals. Whether it’s doing dishes, folding laundry, or going for a run, you have audio going in your ears, and you’re really engaged with it. From an advertising perspective, that’s incredibly powerful because listeners are paying attention to the content.”
AudacyKevin Greenwald, SVP of Advertising and Audience Products
Making sense of scattered listening habits
Today’s listeners consume audio across a variety of devices and platforms. Devices like smart speakers and smart home hubs now account for over 27% of digital audio time spent daily among U.S. adults, highlighting the growing role of connected devices in audio consumption. When listeners bounce between apps, stations, and devices, it’s easy for advertisers to lose track of them. Audacy’s advanced platform capabilities, combined with Experian’s identity solutions, simplify this process by providing a unified view of audience behavior, ensuring campaigns remain cohesive.
Audio is highly adaptable, letting advertisers tweak a message on the fly by shifting tone, length, or format to stay relevant in the moment. This flexibility ensures that campaigns remain cohesive and impactful, no matter where or how listeners engage.
“Audio has a degree of flexibility that other channels don’t. You’re not tied to a programming clock, and ad lengths can vary. It’s also easy to create a great audio ad quickly, which makes it a channel ripe for experimentation and innovation.”
AudacyKevin Greenwald, SVP of Advertising and Audience Products
Following listeners wherever they go
Today’s listeners don’t stay in one place: they bounce from live radio in the morning to streaming music during the day, then wind down with a favorite podcast at night. For advertisers, that creates a challenge: how do you keep up with an audience that’s always moving? Without a unified view of the listener journey, campaigns can lose impact. With the right insights, though, every handoff becomes an opportunity to stay relevant and connected.
Audacy’s platform, combined with Experian’s identity solutions, bridges these gaps. Together, we help you follow your audience wherever they go, creating consistent experiences that drive results. This approach improves targeting and ensures that messages remain impactful.
“I hope that there’s a day coming where we can understand ad exposure in the car as well as more cars are connected and things like that. That would be really powerful.”
AudacyKevin Greenwald, SVP of Advertising and Audience Products
Your audience is listening, let’s make sure they hear you
Audio helps you connect with your audience in moments other channels miss. With Experian’s marketing data and Audacy’s expertise, you can simplify cross-platform targeting, improve campaign measurement, and create messages that truly resonate. Let’s work together to make your message heard.
Let’s talk audio strategy. Contact us today
About our experts
Kevin Greenwald
SVP of Advertising and Audience Products, Audacy
Kevin Greenwald is the SVP of Advertising & Audience Products, where he partners closely with Audacy’s sales team to deliver leading ad product and measurement capabilities for their clients.
Crystal Jacques
VP of Enterprise Partnerships, Experian
Crystal Jacques is the VP of Enterprise Partnerships, leading Experian’s go-to-market team across all verticals. With over ten years of experience in the Identity space, Crystal brings a wealth of expertise to her role. She joined Experian in 2020 through the Tapad acquisition, following her successful stint as the head of Global Channel Partnerships for Adbrain, which The Trade Desk later acquired.
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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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