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
Latest posts
Partnership combines customer connections and cross-device scale to deliver more strategic customer insights NEW YORK AND CHICAGO — March 16, 2017 – Signal, the global leader in customer identity, today announced a partnership with Tapad, now part of Experian and the leading provider of unified, cross-screen marketing technology solutions. This global integration extends device connectivity for Signal’s clients across North America, APAC and EMEA by leveraging Tapad’s proprietary Device GraphTM. With Signal’s Customer Identity Solution, brands benefit from more visibility of known customers, lower costs to reach those customers and decreased expenses and data loss that often results from using multiple vendors. Integrating with Tapad’s Device Graph, which connects billions of devices, enables Signal clients to build an even broader view of their known customers across multiple devices. This integration combines Signal’s customer identity scale with Tapad’s device scale to expand the reach of addressable media channels and enhance customer journey insights across touchpoints. Tapad and Signal were able to drive incremental device connections for more than 65 percent of customer profiles, linking an average of 6.8 browsers and devices per customer. With this combined data set, Signal clients can expand their authenticated view of a customer to all associated devices and realize more strategic insights into their high-value users. The partnership also allows Signal’s clients to integrate in real-time with Tapad’s media platform, Unify. This proprietary technology enables advertisers to make real-time activation and buying decisions with maximum scale, as well as automated reporting and measurement. “Continuously recognizing customers across devices instantly and in a privacy-safe way is essential for marketers to stay competitive,” said Marc Kiven, founder and CRO of Signal. “We are thrilled to enter this unique, global partnership with Tapad, enabling our clients to access their technology and more effectively reach customers in real-time and at scale.” “Being able to leverage a persistent view of customer connections across devices is a huge challenge for brands,” said Pierre Martensson, SVP and GM of Tapad’s global data division. “With Tapad, Signal is now able to connect with the billions of existing data points in our device graph to help clients better understand customer behavior and realize even stronger customer engagement.” Contact us today
Early successes include revenue increases, global partnerships and fundraising NEW YORK, March 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ – Tapad's entrepreneurial mentorship initiative, the Propeller Program, has seen extremely positive results since it began in September 2016. The five early-stage startups selected from Norway have gained momentum in establishing a U.S. presence. Tapad, now a part of Experian, is the leader in unified cross-device marketing technology. The company was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Among the successes within Propeller: Xeneta, the leading ocean freight price comparison platform and contracted rate database, has raised an additional $12M in funding since beginning the Propeller Program. Before the end of 2016, the company had exceeded its revenue expectations by nearly 30 percent, proving the European-focused business could succeed in the American market. "Aside from directly impacting our revenue, the Propeller Program has provided us with incredible access to a countless number of external resources, including subject matter experts from the fields of fundraising, public speaking, corporate structuring and immigration law," said William Di Ieso, GM of North America for Xeneta. "We remain extremely grateful for the opportunity and exposure the program has provided for Xeneta." Bubbly, an in-store real-time engagement tool for non-buyers, now has clients on four continents. After only a few months in the U.S. market, Bubbly has signed deals with one major retail brand, one major toy manufacturer and a major global consulting firm. The Propeller Program has also opened doors for greater opportunities in Scandinavia and EMEA. After an introduction to Telenor Group's President and CEO Sigve Brekke, Bubbly is currently piloting its IoT kiosk with the company. "The mentoring sessions have been very valuable and have given us guidance as to how to best enter the U.S. market," said Marianne Haugland Hindsgaul, Bubbly CEO and co-founder. "Learning to do business in the U.S. is not something you can necessarily learn from a book. The most impactful lessons are based on real-world experience, and that is what the Propeller Program has given us." BylineMe, a marketplace for freelancers, publishers and brands to connect for content creation and distribution services, has built an extensive network of potential clients and investors. The company has tested its product in the U.S. market and gained valuable feedback for further development. Eventum, a property-sharing group that digitally assists in securing venues for meetings and corporate events, has closed a seed round of funding for nearly $1M. Eventum has also made key hires in the areas of business development and engineering "It is so rewarding to be able to support these Norwegian startups in a meaningful way," said Are Traasdahl, CEO and founder at Tapad. "Mentor relationships are critical for strategic growth, and I am proud to be able to pay forward the experiences I have gained as an entrepreneur. To me, the Propeller Program is a shining example of the magic that can happen when Norwegian innovation meets American opportunity." Contact us today
Tapad’s TV analytics solutions now include premium national cable inventory– Travelocity asserts industry need, praises partnership — NEW YORK, February 28, 2017 — Tapad, a part of Experian, has announced its partnership with clypd, the leading audience-based sales platform for television advertising. By integrating clypd’s national cable network inventory, the partnership will expand Tapad’s extensive supply of TV inventory to include premium national cable inventory. Tapad is the leading provider of privacy-safe, cross-screen marketing technology solutions and was first-to-market with a device graph. Clypd’s robust sell-side advertising platform was one of the first built exclusively for the television industry, empowering media owners with solutions that deliver workflow automation, data-enhanced decisioning and, overall, maximize TV campaign performance. Through this partnership, Tapad’s Device Graph-powered TV tools will work in tandem with clypd’s sales platform to enable more precise audience engagement for TV ad buys. This will enable marketers to integrate their customer data or third-party digital segments into Tapad’s TV platform and use them to precisely engage their audience across clypd’s industry-leading footprint of national TV inventory. Campaigns are then optimized using Tapad’s graph-powered TV attribution, ensuring ads are aligned with the best context for each brand’s message. “Clypd is a pioneer in building TV marketplaces,” says Marshall Wong, SVP of TV market development at Tapad. “They were quick to recognize the benefits a device graph could bring to TV so that advertisers can activate linear inventory curated for any digital audience.” “Tapad’s TV activation platform increases the efficiency in which marketers can reach their intended audience on traditional linear TV,” says Doug Hurd, co-founder and EVP of business development at clypd. “Their customized, data-driven campaigns launch with precision and really increase the value marketers can extract from linear TV inventory.” "At Travelocity, we are always looking for ways to more efficiently reach our target audiences,” says Ashley Parker, head of brand marketing at Travelocity. “The combination of traditional linear TV and solutions like this offering from Tapad and clypd are bringing both the tools and the supply to make this vision a reality." Contact us today