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.
Latest posts
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As summer fades, marketers are gearing up for another campaign cycle. It’s a process that repeats itself annually, but we can’t just copy-and-paste our plans. With each passing year, the media landscape changes drastically, as do the behaviors of the audiences we are trying to reach. As ever, marketers have to be strategic—and nimble—to reach the right customers at the right time, with messaging central to seasonal events and personal preferences. Marketers can ensure their messaging reaches the right customers with audience optimization. Reach target audiences this season It can be a hassle to create custom audience segments and bespoke creative messaging every time the seasons change, but now, more than ever, we must ensure brand campaigns are as timely, relevant and personalized as possible. In a world of multitasking and multiscreening, there’s an expectation among consumers that all communications they receive are relevant to them—especially from brands. This is why it’s critical to understand your audiences and how to engage them through the most effective channels. To help marketers win the battle for consumer attention—and sales—4C developed the Scope platform. This self-serve software arms brands with powerful tools for managing audiences and optimizing campaigns across channels including TV and digital. So, whether it’s building an efficient media plan, buying targeted ads, or measuring business outcomes, audience optimization is truly in scope. Deliver audience-based marketing messages across the TV and video space Recently, 4C teamed up with Experian to expand our audience marketplace across linear TV, OTT and social media. Brands using the Scope by 4C™ platform can leverage Experian data across a variety of planning and buying use cases, including audience-based linear TV planning and programmatic scatter buying; OTT campaigns across FreeWheel, Telaria, and SpotX; and social advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Scope’s TV Planner allows marketers to combine historical cost and ad occurrence data with Experian audiences to create customized TV plans in minutes. The outputs go beyond GRPs to maximize in-target impressions for a secondary audience as well as indexing high against the primary demo. With audience-based TV planning brands can truly maximize their upfront buys and use the fantastic reach of linear television for seasonal performance marketing, not just brand awareness. OTT harnesses the big-screen, living-room impact of TV with the targeting precision and flexibility of digital. By using Experian segments to create OTT audiences in Scope, brands can really focus on creative strategy, using the immersive power of video to drive specific business outcomes. From a social perspective, we can combine the pinpoint targeting marketers have come to rely on from platforms like Facebook with advanced segmentation enabled by Experian. The output is high-performing audiences that can be reached at scale with dynamic creative to achieve unparalleled ROI. Focus marketing strategies on audience optimization this season Leveraging customized audiences across channels is the modern approach to marketing and has completely shifted the way marketers target consumers. With the relationship between 4C and Experian, there is now a better way for marketers to identify the most valuable potential customers, uncover the most appropriate messaging, and execute campaigns across the most engaging channels – during peak seasonal campaigns and every single day. Contact us today
With Tapad, part of Experian, technology, AdsWizz AudioMatic is the first Audio buying platform to offer cross-device identity resolution across the U.S. and EMEA NEW YORK and LONDON, July 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian and a global leader in digital identity resolution, today announced a new joint capability with AdsWizz , the leading technology provider for digital audio advertising solutions. The partnership combines Tapad's digital cross-device technology with AdsWizz's AudioMatic buying platform, enabling the ability to connect audio ad experiences across screens. AudioMatic, AdsWizz's audio-centric buying platform, supports programmatic audio buying and entirely new audio ad experiences for listeners. The integration of The Tapad Graph onto its platform enables new opportunities for marketers to reach, engage and measure each interaction with their desired consumers on digital radio and podcasts channels, and across devices. This partnership makes AdsWizz the first audio buying platform to offer this enhanced cross-device identity capability in the US and EMEA markets. "Marketers need privacy-safe digital identity resolution to reach their consumers," says Tom Rolph, VP of EMEA at Tapad. "With audio becoming an increasingly powerful medium for engagement, it's important that our technology extends to this channel, which is why we are excited to announce our integration with AdsWizz's AudioMatic platform." Digital audio is experiencing high growth, with 84% of advertisers and agencies saying it will play a bigger role in their media plans in the future. Today, 60% of digital audio is consumed via a mobile device.* The Tapad Graph is the largest digital identity resolution graph with differentiated global scale. The partnership enables audio advertisers to leverage The Tapad Graph for enhanced attribution, analytics, and targeting. Alexis van der Wyer, CEO at AdsWizz, added, "Digital audio is increasingly becoming ubiquitous in our media consumption and in our daily digital interactions, and because of that, audio advertising offers tremendous opportunity to personally interact with consumers in every moment of their daily lives. By integrating with Tapad, we enable our advertising partners to increase the effectiveness and the relevance of their marketing messages across audio channels." To learn more about Tapad and our digital identity resolution products, visit our identity solutions page. *Digital Audio Exchange, "The Rise of Digital Audio Advertising," https://thisisdax.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/DAX-Whitepaper.pdf About Tapad Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Our one-of-a-kind Graph Select offering enables marketers the flexibility and freedom of choice to correlate devices to varied objectives, driving campaign effectiveness and business results. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About AdsWizz: AdsWizz has created the end-to-end technology platform that is powering the digital audio advertising ecosystem. AdsWizz powers well-known music platforms, podcasts and broadcasting groups worldwide with a comprehensive digital audio software suite of solutions that connect audio publishers to the advertising community. From dynamic ad insertion to advanced programmatic platforms to innovative new audio formats, AdsWizz efficiently connects buyers and sellers in digital audio. AdsWizz is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with an IT Development hub in Bucharest, Romania, and presence in 39 markets around the world. About AudioMatic: AdsWizz Demand Side, audio-centric DSP and audio buying platform, AudioMatic, enables programmatic audio buying and entirely new audio ad experiences that are proven to be more engaging and more effective, and have delivered measurable results for agencies and their brands all over the world. All the biggest ad agencies have used our programmatic trading platform, including Omnicom, GroupM, Havas, Publicis, Mobext, and more. Contact us today