Marketers aren’t thinking in channels anymore: they’re thinking in audiences.
As consumer media habits have scattered across devices, platforms and formats, brands have shifted their focus from managing one channel at a time to delivering a connected experience. That’s the core of omnichannel marketing: meeting people where they are and making each touchpoint feel like part of a larger narrative.
However, most brands still encounter the same roadblocks: siloed data, fragmented planning and tools that don’t integrate. And while the industry talks a great deal about omnichannel marketing, few are actually doing it well. The brands that figure it out won’t just reach more people; they’ll improve brand perception while improving the customer journey, achieving better outcomes, and optimizing their media spend more efficiently.
Learn more about this trend in our 2025 Digital trends and predictions report.
Why omnichannel is no longer optional
Omnichannel marketing has long been a goal, but recent shifts in media and technology now make it a necessity. According to Forrester, 21% of global B2C business and tech professionals identified enhancing omnichannel or cross-channel customer experiences as a top priority for their organization today.
Connected TV (CTV) and commerce media networks are emerging as dominant channels, necessitating the coordination of messaging across an expanding ecosystem of streaming, programmatic display, and commerce-driven environments in addition to the multitude of other addressable (and non-addressable) channels. Fortunately, identity solutions continue to evolve, enabling marketers to maintain audience addressability in digital channels even as traditional signals decline and privacy regulations intensify.
Consumers expect this kind of cohesion. They don’t see “channels” – they just see a brand. A member of your loyalty program might browse a product online, see the exact item later on their socials, and then receive an email offer. If those messages feel disconnected or out of sync, this will not be a good customer experience, and a brand risks wasting impressions and losing conversions.
Omnichannel isn’t about showing up in more places. It’s about showing up with a consistent message.
The opportunities inherent in true omnichannel execution
Despite the industry’s movement toward omnichannel marketing strategies, there are a few untapped opportunities brands would benefit from pursuing.
Break down planning silos to optimize performance
Many marketers still plan and measure media in silos: programmatic display, CTV, commerce media, search, social, email, SMS, and each might have their own budgets, strategies, and KPIs. This disjointed approach leads to inconsistent messaging, inefficient spend, and overexposure or underexposure to key audiences.
The opportunity? Shift toward integrated media planning and measurement. By aligning teams and KPIs across channels, marketers can optimize frequency, coordinate creative sequencing, and better attribute business outcomes. Breaking down internal silos improves the customer experience and drives more effective performance. With two-thirds of North American CMOs naming siloed data as their biggest obstacle, those who solve it stand to gain a clear advantage.
Encourage interoperability to activate audiences consistently
Omnichannel success depends on defining an audience once and reaching them everywhere. But in today’s ecosystem, where walled gardens control inventory and many tools remain disjointed, this is easier said than done. Just under a third of marketers say the tools they use don’t work well together.
The opportunity? Invest in interoperable systems that give you control over your data and privacy-safe solutions like clean rooms or universal IDs that enable consistent audience activation across platforms.
Advocate for a unified identity framework
Audience data remains fragmented: commerce media networks control shopper data, TV platforms hold viewership data, and walled gardens provide limited data transparency and determine which data they will share, making it difficult to recognize, reach, and follow the customer journey across digital touchpoints. Without a unified view, campaigns remain disconnected and cross-channel attribution is difficult.
The opportunity? Advocate for a centralized, privacy-conscious identity framework that bridges fragmented data sources. This would allow marketers to recognize consumers across platforms and deliver cohesive messaging.
Marketers need solutions that enable connected audience activation while respecting privacy requirements and platform-specific constraints. Without this, omnichannel remains an aspiration rather than a reality.
Data and identity: The tools you need in your toolkit to make omnichannel work
Implementing omnichannel right starts with establishing identity. Brands need a foundation that lets them connect the dots: across data, platforms and channels. Here’s how:
Build a unified identity foundation
“A single view of the customer is the foundation of a successful omnichannel program,” says Forrester in a December 2023 report on omnichannel. This begins by connecting disparate data sources, including persistent offline information, such as addresses, emails, names, and phone numbers, with digital signals, in a privacy compliant way. And this, in turn, creates a strong identity foundation. Solutions that integrate hashed email addresses (HEMs), mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), IP addresses, CTV IDs, and universal IDs enable brands to resolve customer identities across different platforms, ensuring that campaigns remain addressable as users transition between channels.
Activate audiences everywhere, without the hassle
Brands should be able to define an audience once and activate it across all addressable channels without unnecessary complexity. Interoperability between demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), clean rooms, and private marketplaces (PMPs) ensures that high-quality audiences are matched with premium inventory in a targeted, transparent, and efficient manner. This connectivity helps maintain consistent audience targeting—even as consumers engage in different environments. By working with a partner that seamlessly integrates with major platforms, marketers ensure that data quality and identity resolution remain intact throughout campaigns, avoiding data loss that occurs when data is transferred between different, disparate platforms.
Measure across channels, and the customer journey
Effective omnichannel marketing isn’t just about reaching audiences—it’s about understanding how different touchpoints contribute to conversions. Advanced attribution models, incrementality testing, and cross-platform frequency management enable brands to use consistent identity across campaign planning, activation and measurement so they connect ad exposures to real-world outcomes. Achieving this requires a strong identity resolution partner—one that can unify audience data across environments and power accurate, privacy-compliant measurement at scale.
The future of omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel is becoming the baseline expectation for modern marketing. The brands that figure out how to connect the dots across the increasingly disparate media landscape will drive better performance and build stronger customer relationships.
By working with a partner that can offer you an end-to-end data and identity solution focused on consumers, not channels, you can better understand your best customers (and your next customers), reach them across channels, and measure cross-channel campaigns more effectively, making true omnichannel execution more achievable.
Get started today
About the author
Kimberley Klevstad
Account Director, Retail, Experian
Kimberley Klevstad is 25-year industry veteran with a wide range of experience driving strategic growth for global accounts across print, online, mobile, location-based and streaming audio platforms. Kimberley is currently a member of the Experian Marketing Services Retail team, advising top retail brands on data and identity strategies that will deepen loyalty and drive acquisition in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Latest posts
If you buy media today, you’re already feeling the shift: the best results don’t always come from broad, open auctions or static “safe site” lists; they’re coming from deals that combine the right data with the right inventory and let algorithms optimize in real time. That’s curation. And when it’s done right, it reduces data and media waste for buyers and raises eCPMs (effective cost per thousand impressions) and win rates for publishers. As part of our Cannes Content Studio series, leaders from Butler/Till, Index Exchange, OpenX, PubMatic, and Yieldmo discuss how curation cuts waste and lifts results. What is real curation? Real curation isn’t “packaging inventory.” It’s a strategic framework built on three pillars: 1. Unique data Privacy-compliant and accurate. 2. Strong supply connections Access to quality inventory from publishers at scale. 3. Optimization tools To measure, refine, and improve performance throughout the campaign lifecycle. Why it matters: Manual approaches hit a ceiling. They can’t react quickly to shifting content, identity signals, or auction dynamics. That’s where technology partners come in, keeping the optimization loop running continuously. Intelligence at every touchpoint Curation isn’t about shifting control between platforms. It’s about better brand decisions, connecting opportunity-rich supply to the brand’s preferred buying platform and enriching each buy with audience data. In practice, supply-side platforms (SSPs) are ingesting richer signals to route inventory more effectively and support frequency caps and deal prioritization, in collaboration with demand-side platforms (DSPs). "I think we’re seeing a shift toward bringing more DSP capabilities into the SSP, like supply-side targeting and data driven curation. Advancements in areas like CTV are enabling targeting based on content signals, and SSPs are pulling in more data to inform which supply is sent to the DSP, helping with things like frequency caps."Matt Sattel Why page-level targeting beats static lists Static domain lists were a useful first step for quality control. The intent was sound, but the approach was too cumbersome for today’s signal-rich buying. Today, AI and contextual engines read the page, not just the site, and adapt in real time. Page-level logic delivers three key benefits: Accuracy by targeting high-intent, page-level content. Relevance by matching the creative to both the content and the audience context. Speed by enabling campaigns to move away from underperforming pages in real time, without waiting for a manual trafficking change. "AI-driven contextual engines evaluate the page, not just the domain, to curate inventory in real time. That moves curation from static allowlists to adaptive logic for greater accuracy, relevance, and speed."Sophia Su Partnerships broaden who influences the buy Curation works when publishers, agencies, data partners, and platforms share signals and KPIs. Horizontal curation (across multiple SSPs) assembles broader, higher-quality reach and resilience, ideal for scale and diversity of supply. Vertical curation (an SSP’s in-house product) provides deep controls within a single exchange, useful for specific inventory strategies. Creative and data now shape supply and demand: better creative decisioning, tested against richer signals, improves outcomes. DSPs remain central for activation and pacing. But the sell-side’s growing intelligence means more accurate inventory routing and signal application before a bid ever fires. "Curation will continue to evolve through deeper data partnerships and expanded use across publishers and agencies, with more sophisticated types of optimization. DSPs will remain critical to activation, even as sell-side decisioning plays a larger role in identifying and shaping the supply to select."Mike McNeeley Curation delivers access and measurable performance Here’s what curated deals are delivering. For buyers ResultType of result36-81%savings on data segments10-70%lower cost per click (CPCs)1.5-3xhigher click-through rates (CTRs)10-30%higher video completion rates For publishers ResultType of result20%bid density118%win rate10%revenue on discovered inventory25%eCRM on incremental impressions Why it works: When data, supply, and optimization are integrated, you reduce waste, surface better impressions, and let algorithms compound your advantage. That’s why curated private marketplaces (PMPs) have grown at ~19% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) since 2019. "Publishers using supply-side curation see ~15% more diverse buyers and 20–25% better performance than buy-side-only targeting. Smarter packaging and signal application tighten auctions and strengthen outcomes."Howard Luks Holistic curation streamlines planning and outcomes Curation adds the data layer earlier in the buying process, starting at the supply-side. This creates more opportunities to reach the right audience and improves scale and performance. By replacing multiple line items with a single curated deal, campaign setup becomes faster and less error-prone. Curated deals also simplify measurement by including the necessary context for accurate attribution, while dynamic adjustments ensure campaigns remain optimized without requiring manual updates. "Publishers using supply-side curation see ~15% more diverse buyers and 20–25% better performance than buy-side-only targeting. Smarter packaging and signal application tighten auctions and strengthen outcomes."Gina Whelehan It’s much more streamlined, bringing more pieces together so we’re thoughtful and holistic. Adding the audience and data element creates more scale and strategy in how we curate supply and data, and ultimately better results for clients. The bottom line Curation has matured from buzzword to performance system. DSPs still anchor activation and pacing, but better sell-side pipes now pre-route inventory and apply signals before any bid starts, making the whole system faster and more accurate. When you combine unique signals, tight supply connections, and always-on optimization, you gain addressability, reduce waste, and achieve better business outcomes for both buyers and sellers. Curation isn’t just a trend; it’s where programmatic advertising is headed. Start testing curated PMPs today to see the difference for yourself. Explore curated PMPs with Audigent Curation FAQs What is curation in performance marketing? Curation in performance marketing is the process of combining data, inventory, and optimization to deliver better results. Audigent supports curated strategies through privacy-safe data and advanced integrations. How does curation benefit marketers? Curation reduces wasted spend by targeting high-quality impressions and optimizing campaigns in real time. Audigent’s solutions help marketers achieve higher click-through rates, lower costs, and better engagement across channels. What are curated PMPs, and why are they important? Curated PMPs are deals that use curated data and inventory to deliver measurable results. They help buyers save on data costs, improve ad performance, and achieve better video completion rates, while publishers see higher win rates and revenue. How does Audigent support curated strategies? Audigent provides unique data assets, privacy-safe integrations, and optimization tools that help marketers and publishers create curated deals. Our solutions ensure campaigns are more efficient, targeted, and effective from start to finish. What’s the difference between horizontal and vertical curation? Horizontal curation combines inventory across multiple platforms for broader reach and diversity, while vertical curation focuses on deep control within a single platform. Both approaches can be tailored to specific campaign goals with Audigent's expertise. Latest posts
In our Ask the Expert Series, we interview leaders from our partner organizations who are helping lead their brands to new heights in AdTech. Today’s interview is with Ben Smith, VP of Product, Data Products at Infillion. Adapting to signal loss What does the Experian–Infillion integration mean for advertisers looking to reach audiences as signals fade? As cookies and mobile identifiers disappear, brands need a new way to find and reach their audiences. The Experian integration strengthens Infillion’s XGraph, a cookieless, interoperable identity graph that supports all major ID frameworks, unifying people and households across devices with privacy compliance, by providing a stronger identity foundation with household- and person-level data. This allows us to connect the dots deterministically and compliantly across devices and channels, including connected TV (CTV). The result is better match rates on your first-party data, more scalable reach in cookieless environments, and more effective frequency management across every screen. Connecting audiences across channels How does Experian’s Digital Graph strengthen Infillion’s ability to deliver addressable media across channels like CTV and mobile? Experian strengthens the household spine of XGraph, which means we can accurately connect CTV impressions to the people and devices in that home – then extend those connections to mobile and web. This lets us plan, activate, and measure campaigns at the right level: household for CTV, and person or device for mobile and web. The outcome is smarter reach, less waste from over-frequency, and campaigns that truly work together across channels. The value of earned attention Infillion has long championed “guaranteed attention” in advertising. How does that philosophy translate into measurable outcomes for brands? Our engagement formats, such as TrueX, are based on a simple principle: attention should be earned, not forced. Viewers choose to engage with the ad and complete an action, which means every impression represents real, voluntary attention rather than passive exposure. Because of that, we consistently see stronger completion rates, deeper engagement, and clearer downstream results – like lower acquisition costs, improved on-site behavior, and measurable brand lift. To take that a step further, we measure attention through UpLift, our real-time brand lift tool. UpLift helps quantify how exposure to a campaign influences awareness, consideration, or purchase intent, providing a more complete picture of how earned attention translates into business impact. Creative innovation and location insights Beyond identity resolution, what are some of Infillion’s capabilities, like advanced creative formats or location-based insights, that set you apart in the market? One key area is location intelligence, which combines privacy-safe geospatial insights with location-based targeting through our proprietary geofencing technology. This allows us to build custom, data-driven campaigns that connect media exposure to real-world outcomes – like store visits and dwell time – measured through Arrival, our in-house footfall attribution product. We also build custom audiences using a mix of zero-party survey data, first-party location-based segments, and bespoke audience builds aligned to each advertiser’s specific strategy. Then there’s creative innovation, which is a major differentiator for us. Our high-impact formats go beyond static display, such as interactive video units that let viewers explore products through hotspots or carousels, rich-media ads that feature polls, quizzes, dynamic distance, or gamified elements, and immersive experiences that encourage active participation rather than passive viewing. These creative formats not only capture attention but also generate deeper engagement and stronger performance for a variety of KPIs. Future ready media strategies How does Infillion’s ID-agnostic approach help brands future-proof their media strategies amid ongoing privacy and tech changes? We don’t put all our eggs in one basket. XGraph securely unifies multiple durable identifiers alongside our proprietary TrueX supply to strengthen CTV household reach. This agnostic design allows us to adapt as platforms, regulations, and browsers evolve – so you can preserve reach and measurement capabilities without getting locked into a single ID or losing coverage when the next signal deprecates. Raising the bar for media accountability Looking ahead, how is Infillion evolving its platform to meet the next wave of challenges in audience engagement and media accountability? From an engagement standpoint, we’re expanding our ability to support the full customer journey, offering ad experiences that move seamlessly from awareness to consideration to conversion. That includes smarter creative that adapts to context, intelligent targeting and retargeting informed by real data, and formats designed to drive measurable outcomes rather than just impressions. When it comes to accountability, we’re ensuring that measurement is both flexible and credible. In addition to our proprietary tools, we partner with leading third-party measurement providers to validate results and give advertisers confidence that their investment is truly performing. Within our DSP, we emphasize full transparency and log-level data access, ensuring advertisers can see exactly what’s happening on every impression. All of this builds toward the next era of agentic media buying – one enabled by our MCP suite and modular, component-based tools. This evolution brings greater accountability and next-generation audience engagement to an increasingly automated, intelligent media landscape. Our goal is to help brands connect more meaningfully with audiences while holding every impression – and every outcome – to a higher standard of transparency and effectiveness. Driving impact across the funnel What is a success story or use cases that demonstrate the impact of the Experian–Infillion integration? We recently partnered with a national veterans’ organization to raise awareness of its programs for injured or ill veterans and their families. Using the Experian integration, we combined persistent household- and person-level identifiers with cross-device activation to reach veteran and donor audiences more precisely across CTV, display, and rich media. The campaign achieved standout results – industry-leading engagement rates, a 99% video completion rate, and measurable lifts in both brand awareness (3.6 % increase) and donation consideration (13.7% lift). It’s a clear example of how stronger identity and smarter activation can drive meaningful outcomes across the full funnel. Contact us Identity resolution FAQs Why is identity resolution critical for CTV and cross-channel campaigns? Identity resolution ensures accurate connections between devices, households, and individuals. Experian's Offline Identity Resolution and Digital Graph strengthen these connections for improved targeting and consistent measurement across CTV, mobile, and web. What strategies help address the loss of cookies and mobile IDs? Solutions like Experian's Digital Graph enable brands to connect first-party data to household and person-level identifiers, ensuring scalable reach and compliant audience targeting legacy signals fade. How can engagement translate into measurable results? Focusing on earned attention (where audiences actively choose to engage) leads to stronger completion rates, improves on-site behavior, and drives measurable increases in brand awareness and consideration. What makes cross-channel targeting more effective? By linking CTV impressions to households and extending those connections to mobile and web, Experian's identity solutions ensure campaigns work together seamlessly, reducing over-frequency and improving overall reach. About our expert Ben Smith VP Product, Data Products, Infillion Ben Smith leads Infillion’s Data Products organization, delivering identity, audience, and measurement solutions across the platform. Previously, he was CEO and co-founder of Fysical, a location intelligence startup acquired by Infillion in 2019. About Infillion Infillion is the first fully composable advertising platform, built to solve the challenges of complexity, fragmentation, and opacity in the digital media ecosystem. With MediaMath at its core, Infillion’s modular approach enables advertisers to seamlessly integrate or independently deploy key components—including demand, data, creative, and supply. This flexibility allows brands, agencies, commerce and retail media networks, and resellers to create tailored, high-performance solutions without the constraints of traditional, all-or-nothing legacy systems. Latest posts
Audigent, a part of Experian, was named Microsoft Advertising’s Curator of the Year. The honor recognizes Audigent’s leadership for advancing privacy-safe, sell-side curation that packages high-quality audiences with premium supply for measurable campaign performance. Once only a buzzword, curation has become a mainstream strategy for activating advertisers’ first-party data and streamlining programmatic buying. To recognize this shift and the leaders driving it, Microsoft introduced Curate and established the Curator of the Year award to celebrate excellence in this category. Audigent was recognized for: End-to-end curation from audience planning through activation for outcomes-based, closed-loop programs. Breadth of deal and supply types using unique datasets, real-time supply connections and always-on optimization. Data-driven activation with curation across a large publisher footprint that utilizes Experian marketing data, first-party data, and partner audiences. Audigent’s unique, contextual, and predictive audience data solutions are built into all programmatic media buying. The combination of Audigent’s Real-Time Data and Curation Platform and first-party data, along with Experian identity and optimization, turns real engagement into ready-to-activate audiences. These audiences are available within Microsoft Curate and across omnichannel buying. "Audigent is proud to be named Microsoft Advertising’s Curator of the Year. This is a clear validation of the work our team has done to make curation the new standard in data-driven programmatic activation. We will continue to set the standard by expanding curated deals in Microsoft Curate. This will help maximize efficiency across the bidstream.”Chris Meredith, Head of Supply Side Partnerships Together, Experian and Audigent connect identity to inventory, enabling advertisers to reach the right audiences with precision and scale. By harnessing Experian identity and audience solutions and activating Audigent-curated deals in Microsoft Curate, brands can unlock new levels of efficiency and performance across every programmatic channel. This recognition sets the stage for even greater innovation, collaboration, and results in the year ahead. Ready to design your curated library? Let's connect Latest posts