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.
Latest posts
As today’s digital landscape gets more and more complicated there are more ways for brands to connect with users and drive purchases and more ways for ad tech to target and measure those touch points. As in-person shopping picks up steam due to the re-normalization of society post-COVID 19; the connection between digital ads and in-person purchases needs to be made once again. With the rise of Connected TV throughout the pandemic there are even more digital opportunities to target a user. But how do you make sure that those brand engagements are captured and correctly attributed to offline purchases and conversions? The answer lies in a holistic identity resolution strategy. Cross-device identity resolution with The Tapad Graph connects the identifiers and devices of individuals within a household to each other; enabling targeting, frequency capping, extension, segmentation and measurement or attribution between devices; including Connected TV and hashed (privacy-protected) email addresses along with Cookies, Mobile Ad Ids and IP Address. Brands can join their first-party data to The Tapad Graph to execute strategies that connect online and offline data for pre, mid and post-campaign efficiencies. Let’s imagine a scenario in which an outdoor retail brand is targeting users watching specific content on a Connected TV device. Powered by identity resolution, they start with a general ad on CTV and continue targeting down individual paths with each user. When one of them converts in store and makes a purchase; the outdoor retailer can connect that action through location and in-store traffic data with the cross-device identity resolution used to execute the digital campaign. Now the actions of the user online and offline are resolved for more accurate measurement and attribution after the campaign ends. But it doesn’t stop there– the brand's CRM data can be reactivated for the next digital campaign and leveraged to capitalize on the most effective media mix for the user who made the purchase previously. These combined insights can be invaluable in shaping up future campaign strategies with geo-contextual ads, recommended additional products and personalization to help drive more conversions and purchases in-store or online. As in-person shopping picks back up and marketers are tasked once again with balancing online and in-store KPIs, the right identity resolution strategy can unlock necessary efficiencies for retailers, ad tech vendors and agencies tasked with supporting these initiatives. Get in touch
Experian Marketing Services and Data Quality President Genevieve Juillard recently sat down with Zach Rodgers, host of the AdExchanger Talks podcast to discuss the future of identity, the importance of data transparency and privacy, and our recent acquisition of Tapad. Genevieve focused on the opportunity for our industry to reimagine an advertising ecosystem that is resilient and adaptable; one that takes advantage of emerging data and prioritizes data transparency and consumer privacy. She also discussed the importance of advertising strategies that put consumers at the heart of every decision and give them more control over their data. Genevieve shared with AdExchanger that Experian’s acquisition of Tapad, a global leader in digital identity resolution, was a natural fit for our company. Tapad’s approach and role in the ecosystem is very much aligned with Experian’s, which is to develop solutions that are resilient to industry and consumer changes. The combination of our capabilities supports interoperability across all types of identifiers, both online and offline, and will position us to help our clients navigate the post-third-party cookie world. To learn more about Experian’s plans to support an effective advertising ecosystem that will evolve with our dynamic industry, listen to the full podcast Embracing ‘Healthy Fragmentation’ In Ad Tech, With Genevieve Juillard. Get in touch
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