I’ve officially been at Experian Marketing Services for one month. That’s long enough to get past the onboarding checklists, meet an incredible number of people, and start connecting the dots between what I believed from the outside and what I now see clearly from the inside.
What’s surprised me most is not the scale of Experian’s assets. Everyone knows Experian operates at massive scale. It’s the uniqueness of how those assets come together. Identity. Activation. Curation. Optimization. Measurement. And a culture that understands the responsibility that comes with being the identity and data backbone for the AdTech ecosystem. There’s real energy here around not just what’s possible, but how to do it the right way.
Very early on, this felt like the right move. The people confirmed it immediately. The leadership team reinforced it just as quickly. There’s alignment around how we go to market, how we think about identity, and how seriously we take client trust. That matters, especially in a moment when marketers are being asked to do more with less, prove everything, and still protect the consumer at every turn.
The reality marketers are facing right now
I’ve spent my career working with brands and agencies navigating change. What’s different right now is the level of fragmentation. Signals are everywhere. They’re coming from transactions, media exposure, location, content consumption, commerce, and increasingly from AI-driven interactions that don’t follow traditional linear paths. The challenge is no longer access to data. It’s coherence.
If I’m a marketer today, my core question is simple: How do I tie a durable identity structure to constantly evolving consumer signals, and feed that intelligence into the right places at the right time? Especially as I start interacting with AI buying agents that will make decisions on my behalf. If the signals those systems receive are noisy, incomplete, or misaligned with my brand, I lose control fast.
Identity has to be the foundation
That’s where identity stops being a background capability and becomes foundational. Without a strong, continuously refreshed identity framework, everything downstream breaks. Planning becomes guesswork. Activation becomes inefficient. Measurement becomes misleading. I see too many brands treating identity as a one-time project. Build a graph. Do some householding. Declare victory. But people change. Households change. Signals multiply. Identity has to evolve just as fast.
One of the biggest misconceptions I walked into was how narrowly Experian is often viewed. Many marketers still think of us as a place to buy attributes. Full stop. What I see now is a connected system that supports the full marketing lifecycle:
- Audience creation
- Activation
- Curation
- Optimization
- Measurement
All grounded in identity and executed in a way that’s measurable and privacy-forward.
Audigent + Experian’s data marketplace. This is where things click.
This becomes even more powerful when you layer in Audigent. Audigent was foundational in defining curation, the idea that it’s not just about having data or inventory, but about intentionally pairing the right audience signals with the right supply to drive outcomes. When you combine Audigent’s curation expertise with Experian’s identity, data, and marketplace capabilities, something meaningful happens.
That same philosophy extends directly into our data marketplace. It’s not just about accessing unique data sets. It’s about safely combining Experian data with partner data, or even multiple partner data sets together, to create audiences that simply don’t exist anywhere else. Then tying those audiences to real-world exposure and conversion across online and offline environments.
This matters across industries, but especially in two places:
- Regulated verticals like healthcare and financial services, where accuracy and privacy are non-negotiable.
- Industries sitting on valuable first-party data like retail, travel, and automotive.
No single company has all the signals they need. The opportunity is in collaboration. Partnering data in a trusted environment to create better outcomes and, in many cases, entirely new revenue streams.
Looking ahead
As AI continues to reshape how media is planned and bought, signals will become the currency. Not just any signals. The right ones. Curated, contextual, and connected to identity in a way that reflects real consumer behavior. Marketers who win will be the ones who control that signal flow, rather than reacting to it.
After one month, what excites me most is that Experian is built for this moment. Years of investment in identity. A data marketplace designed for collaboration. And teams who understand that our job is not just to help marketers reach people, but to help them do it responsibly, efficiently, and in a way that actually drives outcomes.
We’re just getting started.
About the author
Kevin Dunn
Chief Revenue Officer, Experian
Kevin Dunn joins Experian Marketing Services with more than 20 years of leadership experience across marketing and advertising technology, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of Brands and Agencies at LiveRamp. In that role, he led growth across retail, CPG, travel, hospitality, financial services, and healthcare, overseeing new business, account expansion, and channel partnerships.
Kevin is known for building cohesive, accountable teams and leading with optimism, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose. His leadership philosophy centers on empowering people, driving positive outcomes for clients and fostering a culture where teams can grow, take smart risks, and succeed together.
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Advertisers continue to increase their spending across addressable TV, connected TV (CTV), and digital. According to IAB's "2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook" report, digital video ad spending is expected to increase by 26% to $49.2 billion in 2022. Understanding who consumers are and how to best reach them in their preferred channel is becoming more complex. Damian Amitin and Colleen Dawe discuss how a seamless identity strategy can address the complexity of the emerging TV space. The evolution of identity resolution Around ten years ago, the idea of digital “identity resolution” or “Device Graphs” was born. This idea connected cookies and MAIDs to understand when many IDs were the same person or household. In more recent years, our industry began to connect that initial understanding to the CTV ecosystem. But, a large part of the TV ecosystem existed in silos, like first and third-party audience data, and the growing advanced TV market. The goal of identity resolution has always been to understand the consumer better. To achieve more accurate targeting and measurement in the CTV ecosystem, we must incorporate the following: What we know about the household and consumer from an ID perspective Who the consumer is as it relates to audience data, as well as the wealth of first-party data in the advanced TV space We know the cookie is a flawed way to collect data. While Google delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies, there are other challenges that we face right now. Such as the glaring gap in Safari traffic and the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) turning to “opt-in." Understanding consumer behavior across devices and platforms continues to challenge marketers and publishers. These challenges are creating the need to find more stable identifiers. Though the cookie remains valuable, it has an uncertain future. This has led advertisers to place bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. The overlap in addressable and CTV data leads to fragmentation Personally identifiable information (PII) makes up the majority of addressable TV households' data. Part of the attraction to CTV is that their IDs remain universal, persistent, and stable. Analysts project that CTV ad spending will hit $23B in 2023. Consumers now have an average of 4.7 streaming subscriptions per household. It’s no surprise then, that Disney+, HBO, and Netflix released or announced ad-supported tiers. Addressable TV and CTV are often thought of as distinct markets across the industry. But, in the context of identity, we should look at them through the same lens. Millions of households still consume TV and video content via a set-top box or through apps on CTVs. This is in addition to what they consume on their laptops, tablets, and phones. Of the top 11 cable and satellite providers, 65 million U.S. households still have a box in their homes. On the other hand, approximately 96 million U.S. households have at least one or more Smart TVs and streaming services. With about 126 million total U.S. TV households, that’s a lot of overlap. There are still significant numbers of both addressable and CTV homes. How can we address fragmented TV consumption? Through a holistic and comprehensive approach to identity. An approach that captures addressable TV, CTV, and digital identifiers. An approach that captures all audience attributes inside of a single identity graph. This is the ideal approach for publishers, AdTech vendors, and brands. Discover how to unlock holistic identity How can we achieve a holistic identity? Through a three-pillared approach: First-party data onboarding Digital identifiers Consumer data First-party data onboarding Bringing offline data from a brand’s consumers is very valuable due to the quality of the data. Because the data is being collected right from the source, you know it’s accurate. It provides the foundation you can build your identity strategy from. Digital identifiers Once you create a foundation with first-party data, you need to connect it. Either with an internal or licensed digital ID graph. Then you can understand the connections between all devices within the household. Consumer data After you know which devices tie to a single consumer, you'll want to act on that knowledge. The next step is to partner with a data provider that can help you understand your consumers. Establishing this partnership will help improve targeting, measurement, and the customer experience. To achieve a well-rounded customer view tomorrow, we need to start today The three-pillared approach bridges the gap between the offline and online worlds. This provides a well-rounded view of customers and audiences. However, the ability to tie these aspects of identity together still presents several challenges. To achieve the three-pillared approach today, you need to use many vendors and fragmented data sources. Often with conflicting data. As we look forward, the tools to do this are becoming more advanced and unified. The players in our ecosystem should adopt a seamless identity strategy. One that provides a privacy-safe yet full-picture solution. That means capturing and unifying all devices within a household. While also understanding the consumer behaviors and profiles behind those devices. As TV becomes more sophisticated, our data and services will enable you to unlock a holistic identity. Chris Feo, SVP of Advanced TV and Platforms, spoke with Broadcasting & Cable about how our data powers measurement, audience insights, and results for businesses within the TV space. "As more and more companies enter the general TV space, whether you're a publisher, an advertiser or anyone in between that's doing measurement, insights, analytics, our data or our services will play a role in some part of that value exchange." – Chris Feo, SVP of Advanced TV and Platforms, Experian Marketing Services Keep up with your customers and their data Once we create an informed identity strategy, we can begin to understand the makeup of each household and the individuals within. In this new world, personalizing the experience for an audience is key. Where do they prefer to spend their time? What type of content are they most engaged in? Only then can we as an industry provide an optimal experience for each consumer. All while driving greater ROI for advertisers and publishers. Are you ready to know more about your customers than ever before? Let's get to work together to achieve your marketing goals. Contact us to learn how we can connect the complex dots of identity resolution. About our experts Damian Amitin, VP of Enterprise Partnerships, Experian Marketing Services Damian Amitin is the VP of Enterprise Partnerships and joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. Damian is a senior sales and partnerships executive, specializing in the identity resolution and marketing data ecosystem. Damian helps brands, publishers, and technology vendors enable enhanced ID resolution through The Experian/Tapad platform to attain a 360 view of the customer across targeting analytics, attribution, and personalization. Colleen Dawe, Senior Account Executive, Experian Marketing Services Colleen Dawe is a Senior Account Executive on the Advanced TV Team within Experian Marketing Services. With 15 years of experience working within the television ecosystem, Colleen works with clients to bring the value and expertise of Experian to support their objectives in the areas of data, identity, activation, and measurement. Get in touch