Marketers are under more pressure than ever to deliver personalized, high-performing campaigns—while navigating tighter budgets, shifting privacy expectations, and fragmented tech stacks. Despite an explosion of tools and data sources, the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed.
Every great campaign still starts with a simple question: Who are we trying to reach?
The answer depends on how well you understand your customers. Increasingly, that understanding is hampered by data silos, inconsistent identity signals, and disconnected workflows between planning, activation, and measurement. When those pieces don’t align, it leads to inefficient spending, incomplete insights, and missed opportunities.
To move forward, marketers need more than better tools—they need a more connected approach.
Start with a complete view of the customer
The foundation of effective marketing is understanding your audience—not just who they are, but what they care about and how to reach them across devices and platforms.
That starts with building a complete customer profile. For many marketers, this means linking persistent offline data—such as name and address—with fresh digital signals like device IDs and online behaviors. When combined, these elements provide a high-fidelity view of the customer that can be enriched with attributes like demographics, purchase behavior, and lifestyle interests.
This kind of profile doesn’t just help you understand people—it helps you build audience segments that actually perform. Whether you’re working with your own CRM data or third-party sources, the ability to create addressable segments that are both accurate and scalable is what separates good campaigns from great ones.
🛳️ That’s exactly what MMGY did for Windstar Cruises. By layering first-party data with behavioral and demographic insights, they built custom audiences that more than doubled campaign benchmarks.
🎮 Gaming platform Unity tapped into Experian audiences to understand player behaviors across web, mobile, and connected TV (CTV). These insights helped their advertisers reach gaming audiences more effectively—tailoring creative and delivery to real-world preferences, not assumptions.
Activate with precision, not just volume
Knowing your audience is only half the battle. The next challenge is reaching them—consistently and efficiently—across multiple channels.
This is where fragmentation can creep back in. All too often, marketers build audiences in one system, but activate in another, causing data loss and targeting mismatches. A more connected strategy uses the same identity and audience spine across planning and activation, reducing signal loss and improving accuracy.
👉 Curated private marketplaces (PMPs), for example, allow marketers to match high-quality audiences with premium inventory in a targeted, transparent, and efficient way. These deals let marketers align their spending with their goals—whether that’s lowering cost-per-acquisition or boosting reach in a key vertical.
Performance results are bearing this out:
When identity, audience, and inventory are aligned, everyone benefits—marketers, publishers, and consumers.
Measure what matters
Too often, measurement is treated as an afterthought. But in a connected campaign, it’s built in from the beginning.
By using consistent identity across planning, activation, and measurement, marketers can connect ad exposure to real-world outcomes—whether that’s an online conversion, an in-store visit, or a new customer relationship.
This kind of closed-loop measurement turns marketing into a learning engine. You don’t just see what happened—you understand why it happened and can use that information to improve the next campaign.
🛳️ In the case of Windstar Cruises, MMGY used Experian identity to precisely measure how digital ad exposures translated into bookings. That kind of visibility gives marketers more than a report card. It gives them the feedback they need to optimize smarter next time—and prove ROI every time.
The future is connected
To meet today’s demands, marketers need a new way of working—one that starts with a complete understanding of the customer, builds addressable audiences on a strong identity foundation, activates them precisely across channels, and measures impact in real time.
The marketers embracing this approach are already seeing results: stronger performance, more efficient spending, and deeper insights that power what comes next.
The future won’t be built on more tools—it will be built on more connection.
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Distribution via LiveRamp enables seamless cross-device customer experiences through more platforms NEW YORK, Nov. 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ – Tapad, now part of Experian and the leading provider of unified cross-device marketing technology solutions, today announced an expanded partnership with LiveRamp™, an Acxiom® company and leading provider of omnichannel identity resolution, to make the proprietary Tapad Device Graph™ accessible beyond Tapad-hosted direct integrations. Through LiveRamp, Tapad's Device Graph Access now extends to more than 400 ad tech and mar tech platforms. Tapad's Device Graph™ enables marketers to understand, monetize and measure consumer engagement across all digital channels, and Tapad's unified consumer view is recognized as one of the most accurate, scalable cross-device solutions in the market today. Through the expanded partnership with LiveRamp, the Tapad Device Graph can be distributed to the hundreds of platforms used to reach consumers on digital channels and measure campaign performance – even as devices are added daily to Tapad's extensive graph. "Increasingly, marketers want access to cross-device targeting and measurement capabilities within their preferred platforms," said Anneka Gupta, chief product officer of LiveRamp. "Our expanded partnership makes it easy for marketers to access Tapad's graph through the rapidly growing set of integrations available in our partner ecosystem." This is the latest of several initiatives between the two technology platforms designed to make the integration of cross-screen platforms seamless, privacy-safe and easy to use for dynamic and engaging marketing efforts. "During the past year, Tapad has expanded its global presence and rapidly grown its data business – Tapad Coral – doubling the number of companies integrating our device graph into their platforms and growing our annualized run rate by 210%," said Pierre Martensson, GM of Tapad Coral and APAC. "Our expanded partnership with LiveRamp positions us to meet the increased demand for Tapad Device Graph Access and enable new platforms to apply our graph with unprecedented speed." Contact us today
Cross-Screen Pioneer Explores the Power of Connected Cars as a Vehicle for Customer Engagement LAS VEGAS, NV — (October 26, 2016) –Kate O’Loughlin, GM of Media for Tapad, addressed the J.D. Power Automotive conference audience today in Las Vegas, NV. With more than 1,400 participants representing every facet of the automotive marketing profession, the conference has become the industry's leading marketing event. Bringing the unified, cross-screen perspective to the stage, O’Loughlin discussed the vital role of connected cars in the consumer engagement process. She is a founding member of Tapad which launched the world’s first cross-screen marketing technology in 2010. Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group early in 2016. Key points from O’Loughlin’s J.D. Power 2016 address included: The marketers who deliver relevant and engaging content in a privacy-safe setting will be in the strongest position to navigate the proliferation of connected devices, including the connected points in cars. As automakers innovate the technology in cars, marketers need to be prepared for the size and diversity of data available for understanding consumers. It’s going to be increasingly difficult to wade through the data, so now is the time to build a solid framework for understanding the person behind the data. Marketers who evolve — and take a holistic approach — to their campaign measurements will achieve marked improvements in efficiency and an enhanced understanding of their core audiences. Actionable brand engagement metrics like Viewable Exposure Time (VET) will continue to overtake traditional advertising performance metrics. VET evaluates the optimal amount of time an ad is present on a screen to incite consumer action. In early testing by Tapad, campaigns that employ VET see conversion rate performance improvements from 13 to 60%. The consumer-centric technology solutions of the future need to be as scalable as they are affordable. Learn more about Tapads’ recommended Viewable Exposure Time metric contact us today! Contact us today
NEW YORK, Sept. 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ – Tapad, the leader in cross-device marketing technology, today announced a new metric for cross-device marketers, Viewable Exposure Time (VET). Viewable Exposure Time measures across screens and ad formats, identifying the optimal amount of time a consumer spends with an ad before they take action. The announcement coincides with Unify Tech '16, Tapad's third-annual cross-device summit during Advertising Week NY. Frequency caps are currently used to ensure that dollars aren't wasted on redundant ads. Viewable Exposure Time evolves the frequency capping approach to include accelerating a consumer's ad exposure rate up to the optimal time spent with the brand. VET is used in affinity, digital transaction and offline purchase models as a key indicator of marketing budget well-spent. Beta users of VET span every vertical, though interest is especially high from CPG, Automotive, Telecommunications and Retail. Viewable Exposure Time unifies and upgrades marketers' predictors of advertising success by leveraging cross-screen engagement across digital and television, with vendor-agnostic viewability scores for video, rich media and display. "Today's current measurement options, like click-through rate (CTR) and TV gross ratings points (GRP) tell an incomplete story," said Tapad GM of Media Kate O'Loughlin. "Tapad is focused on measuring what really matters to marketers – building an efficient connection with a customer. Innovation in metrics was long overdue." More than just a measurement tool, Tapad also provides clients with VET activation. Factoring in time spent with ads in viewable seconds and minutes, these analytics inform marketers about which audiences are underexposed, enabling them to adjust campaigns and deliver according to optimal viewable exposure time. This effectively increases conversion rates at the lowest cost. Contact us today