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
Marketers Using Centro’s DSP Basis Can Leverage Tapad’s Technology for Extended Cross-device Reach Chicago – May 15, 2018 – Centro, a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced that its Basis programmatic ad platform has licensed cross-device marketing technology from Tapad, a part of Experian, the company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer. Media professionals using Basis can now drive better performance by identifying a person across the different devices he or she uses, serving ads in the most optimum environment, then analyzing performance to see what ad worked best based on creative, device, location and time of day. Today’s digital media ecosystem is fragmented. People consume content on their multiple devices from multiple locations. According to digital analytics firm GlobalWebIndex, a typical consumer owns three digital devices and has seven digital ID’s active in the last 60 days. Advertising technology that treats every device as a single user would not be able to guide customers down the marketing funnel according to how users jump from one device to the next. Furthermore, they wouldn’t see when conversions occur on a device different from that in which the ad was first shown to the user. The Tapad Graph identifies the point of conversion across all screens – smartphones, tablets, home computers, and smart TVs – so that marketers can better gauge the efficiency and return on ad spend. “Our technology helps brands gain a deeper level of understanding of their customer, enabling marketers to better deliver services and products users want,” said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships, Tapad. “With our technology as part of Basis, Centro is providing robust, accessible tools for marketers that want to advance their knowledge of the consumers they want to reach.” Centro’s Basis enables advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. It is the only platform that combines all of these elements with cross-device conversion attribution and advanced reporting features in a DSP. With the Tapad Graph integrated into Basis, marketers can now identify consumers across all of their devices during any point of the consumer journey. This can help marketers determine ad spend effectiveness for optimizing campaigns in real-time or for the future. Other cross-device marketing capabilities for Basis users include: Frequency Capping: Apply frequency caps at a unique person-level rather than at a device-level to prevent saturating users with ads and showing them more impressions than desired. Audience extension: Expand the reach of a campaign by learning what other devices a single user may have, then deliver ads to single users’ other devices. Reporting insights: Learn how users interact with ads across their devices. Gain insight about how consumers respond on devices to improve targeting parameters. Conversion attribution: Record conversions on devices different from that in which the ad was displayed to learn the true effectiveness of advertising efforts. “Cross-device analytics and optimization aligns with our vision that converging the different parts of digital media to create a holistic view of campaigns will drive performance,” said Katie Risch, EVP of customer experience, Centro. “Having Tapad’s powerful capability of personalized marketing gives our advertisers high-quality data to cultivate relationships with customers, wherever they are in digital channels.” About Tapad Tapad Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company's signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world's largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad's numerous awards include: Forbes' Most Promising Companies, Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, Crain's Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award's "Startup Founder of the Year." Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world's largest mobile operators. About Centro Centro is a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising organizations. Its technology platform, Basis, is the first of its kind SaaS advertising solution unifying programmatic and direct media buying, along with workflow automation, cross-channel campaign planning, universal reporting and business intelligence. It boosts media, team and business performance by enabling advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. Contact us today
The concept of identity resolution has emerged over the years as a strategic imperative among marketers and technology vendors. A report by Forrester contends that accurately establishing and maintaining customer identity is one of the most perplexing challenges facing marketers today. Customers have footprints in the offline and online worlds and tend to seamlessly transition across various channels and devices – presenting a unique challenge to truly understand who they are. But the ability to stitch these disparate components of information together means marketers can make better decisions and have more meaningful interactions with their customers. And for customers, this means an experience with personalized advertising content more likely to resonate with them. Why should marketers prioritize identity? The ability to accurately identify customers is the most basic prerequisite for marketing analytics, orchestration and execution. As such, it is becoming increasingly important for brands and marketers planning to link together disparate systems of audience insights and engagement to foster a more seamless and personalized omnichannel customer experience. For example, if an advertiser can identify a customer’s interests, as well as how that person prefers to consume information, then the advertiser can create and deliver messaging that will resonate with the customer. However, like most competitive differentiators, the mission critical components to accurately determine an identity reside within the suite of identity management tools at the marketers’ disposal and the expertise required for proper execution – a struggle for most marketers. But when properly implemented, a comprehensive customer identity strategy can be among a brand or marketer’s most valuable and proprietary assets. Where to begin with identity resolution? With the convergence of CRM platform data, cross-channel online touchpoints, offline record linkage management, probabilistic cross-device graphs, and data onboarding—evolving from point solutions to unified platforms—marketers are faced with an increasingly complex set of challenges in addressing and solving for customer identity management. To properly implement from the get go, and to avoid having to bolt on disparate technologies down the road, emerging industry trends and success stories suggest marketers need a neutral technology service provider that can provide each of these solutions via a single, unified platform. A vendor that can build a solid identity management foundation comprised of omni-channel targeting and attribution, cross-device resolution, online-offline linkage management, and data onboarding form the nexus of a cohesive identity strategy, built to last. Experian helps connect consumer identity As a trusted name in data and information services for more than 40 years, we are committed to privacy by design and the responsible usage and security of data. Whether you’re a brand, agency, or publisher, Experian has the wide-ranging toolset to help you put people at the heart of your business and make better marketing decisions. By harnessing the power of the sum of these parts, fusing both offline and online identifiers and attributes, Experian has established a leadership position in identity management. If you're ready to begin building your identity foundation, contact us and get started today! Learn more about why identity matters to marketers and consumers, here! Contact us today
Partnership Yields Increased Match and Connectivity Rate Through Tapad Graph, acquired by Experian March 27, 2018 — New York, N.Y. — Tapad, part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer and today announced the impactful results of its strategic partnership with Flashtalking, the leading global independent platform for ad delivery, unification and insights. Flashtalking is one of Tapad's most engaged partners, using the Tapad Graph to unify cross-device engagement and identity-driven consumer behaviors for attribution modeling. The company leverages a unique identifier that, in conjunction with Tapad's Graph, provides robust multi-touch attribution solution for its clients. This partnership has resulted in above-industry match and bridge rates for Flashtalking and its customers. Overall, the Tapad Graph yielded a 71 percent match rate with 41 percent of converters engaging on multiple devices, highlighting the importance of cross-device measurement. Tapad’s identity solutions provide Flashtalking with a more holistic view of global engagement. Flashtalking marries ad server log file data with the Tapad Graph to connect all interactions in the consumer journey. This enables Flashtalking to provide more accurate and impactful cross-device attribution, which ultimately enables better optimization. These achievements have led to recognition of Tapad and Flashtalking’s work by the I-COM Global Forum for Marketing, Data and Measurement. “Tapad allows us to understand user engagement across devices and platforms at both the household or individual user level, which is extremely beneficial when providing marketers with true path to conversion and attribution,” said Steve Latham, global head of analytics at Flashtalking. “Since our relationship began, we’ve successfully leveraged Tapad data to provide more accurate, actionable insights that have helped numerous brands achieve substantial gains in media effectiveness.” Flashtalking client Michael Lamontagne, SVP of analytics and CRM at 22squared says “We are big believers in using cross-device insights to improve our campaigns. Flashtalking has been a strategic partner in the pursuit of that goal. By incorporating the Tapad Graph, Flashtalking delivers powerful insights into user engagement and media attribution across browsers and devices. Of equal importance, their bundled solution makes it easy and efficient, saving our team countless hours of busy work.” “Our ongoing work with Flashtalking has had a significant impact on the accomplishments we’ve achieved,” said Chris Feo, SVP, strategy & global partnerships at Tapad. “Being able to grow with a dedicated partner that leverages our proprietary technology in unique ways has helped us uncover the global impact our services can have on a business. We’re proud to drive success for Flashtalking’s clients on a global scale.” Contact us today