
Have you wondered how the shift toward real-time data is reshaping the way companies connect with consumers? Traditional methods of third-party data collection and demographic targeting are being replaced by more privacy-conscious approaches. In our next Ask the Expert segment, we explore how Experian and Captify’s partnership is harnessing the power of real-time onsite search data to enhance personalized advertising, address identity fragmentation, and provide valuable insights for navigating modern advertising challenges.
We’re joined by industry leaders, Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships. In this segment, they discuss the complexities of identity and the innovative use of real-time data in digital advertising. Watch the full Q&A below to learn more about these topics and discover how the collaborative efforts of Experian and Captify are shaping the future of personalized advertising.
Understanding the power of real-time marketing data
Real-time data provides an up-to-the-minute view of consumer behavior, enabling marketers to make quick, informed decisions. Captify’s use of real-time search data allows for immediate insights, contrasting with traditional third-party data, which often involves delay and prompted answers. This approach allows marketers to see trends and reactions as they unfold, making it possible to tweak campaigns and strategies and always reach the most in-market consumers. By using Captify’s real-time data, we can predict consumer interests and adapt to market changes quickly.
Staying ahead of market trends with predictive analytics
Captify analyzes more than a billion search signals daily, giving brands a detailed look at changes in audience behavior. These real-time insights help businesses make timely adjustments and reach their audiences in the moments that matter. Beyond digital media, Captify’s multi-channel activation strategy extends to platforms such as connected TV and digital out-of-home, ensuring messages remain relevant and effective.
How Experian and Captify work together
Imagine being able to tailor your ads to consumers’ needs and interests in real time. Our partnership with Captify enhances ad targeting and measurement by combining Experian’s vast Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data. “Captify has evolved beyond relying on third-party cookies in isolation and now uses the Experian Graph to provide a more holistic view of identity at both the individual and household levels” says Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify.
As privacy concerns grow, we have built and continue to invest in a signal-agnostic Digital Graph that can make connections across a wide range of identifiers, including the Experian Living Unit ID (LUID). The LUID is a unique identifier representing each household in the United States, based on real households and real people. This allows essential demographic information to be enriched to a household, enriching first-party data with detailed consumer insights, like age, gender, historical purchase behavior, and future purchase intent. By continuously adding new data and building fresh audiences and segments, we provide greater insights into the consumer base. Our Digital Graph serves as Captify’s identity spine, allowing them to connect identifiers together at both the person and household levels. This helps their clients target ads more accurately across different channels, making it easier to track and understand consumer behavior across platforms like TV, digital, and radio.
Here are five key ways our partnership enhances ad targeting and measurement:
Enhancing personalized advertising with real-time insights
Identity fragmentation is a challenge for marketers because consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Experian and Captify’s partnership provides the fuel to help advertisers by integrating real-time search data with identity graphs, allowing for accurate targeting across various channels. By combining Experian’s robust Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data, advertisers can deliver highly personalized ads on connected TV that retain their relevance and impact, no matter where the consumer engages with the content.
“We ingest the Experian Graph as part of our internal Graph, allowing us to connect identifiers together at both person and household levels, which aligns with our expansion into TV, out-of-home, and audio channels.”
Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify
Addressing identity fragmentation
A fragmented identity occurs when consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Advertisers need holistic media plans instead of fragmented strategies that risk disengaging consumers, while publishers must demonstrate their platforms’ value by targeting seamlessly.
By enriching and distributing thousands of demographic and behavioral segments, Experian provides the essential data needed to effectively target diverse audiences. Experian’s Digital Graph complements Captify’s data by connecting various identifiers, providing a complete view of individuals and households. This approach helps advertisers overcome fragmentation challenges, and ensure their messages reach the right audience across multiple touchpoints.
Optimizing creative content dynamically
Using real-time data, advertisers can adjust creative elements of their ads to better match consumer interests. This means changing parts of an ad, like images or text, based on current audience data, making it more relevant to the consumer. By partnering with Experian, Captify continues to see a rounded view of a consumer, allowing them to provide clients around the globe with data-driven creatives. These creatives achieve better results than standard ones and enable more meaningful connections with consumers.
Integrating search data into connected TV
Real-time search data plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of connected TV (CTV) advertising. Captify’s identity solution uses persistent identifiers from the Experian Digital Graph to extract value from onsite search data. Machine learning technology then categorizes these searches to understand consumer intent and create highly relevant audiences. By integrating Captify’s consumer intent data, advertisers can deliver more targeted and relevant ads on CTV platforms. This integration helps marketers reach viewers with content that resonates.
Ensuring multi-channel message consistency
Consistency in messaging across multiple channels is key for maintaining brand integrity and consumer trust. By using Experian’s identity data, Captify ensures that advertisers can deliver cohesive messages across various platforms, including TV, digital, and radio. This integration not only enhances ad targeting precision but also solidifies the brand’s presence, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the same core message for a unified brand experience.
Watch the full Q&A
Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Amelia and Chris’ full conversation. In their discussion, they cover identity beyond identifiers, personalized advertising strategies, and the evolving consumer journey. Amelia and Chris also share about interoperability challenges in CTV and how Captify is using alternative IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2).
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About our experts

Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify
Amelia is Chief Product Officer at Captify, leading the Product, Engineering, Partnerships and Insight teams globally. During her three years at Captify, Amelia has delivered on her product vision to put Captify’s Search Intelligence in the hands of all advertisers—unlocking competitive advantage for clients and partners in a way that’s omnichannel, strategic, open and future-proof. She has launched Captify’s Advanced TV, cookieless and data partnerships product lines. Amelia brings over a decade of experience in driving product strategy, underpinned by expertise across data science, machine learning, and analytics. She has a PhD in computational neuroscience and previous roles include product leadership at LiveRamp and Aimia.

Chris Feo, SVP, Sales & Partnerships, Experian
As SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris has over a decade of experience across identity, data, and programmatic. Chris joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. He joined Tapad with less than 10 employees and has been part of the executive team through both the Telenor and Experian acquisitions. He’s an active advisor, board member, and investor within the AdTech ecosystem. Outside of work, he’s a die-hard golfer, frequent traveler, and husband to his wife, two dogs, and two goats!
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The Tapad Device Graph™ Complements Freckle’s IoT Capabilities to Extend Scale and Precision of Audience Data New York, NY — December 6, 2017 — Tapad, part of Experian, is the leader in cross-device marketing technology and Freckle IoT, the global leader in multi-touch, offline attribution, today announced they are partnering to provide brands with a holistic and insightful view of their customers, in predefined locations in all global markets. Starting today Freckle IoT will be leveraging the Tapad Device Graph™ to supplement the company’s data set to offer brands more granular attribution data. Consumer’s online behavior is becoming more and more complex, with the average consumer owning three or more devices and 35 percent of consumers converting on a different device from the one on which they started their research. These interactions become even more complicated when considering how online interactions and media impact offline sales. The collaboration between Tapad and Freckle, which combines Freckle IoT’s persistent location data with Tapad’s proprietary cross-device technology, is an important step in empowering brands with the information they need to better understand how digital media, consumed across multiple devices, is impacting offline attribution. Using its opt-in, first-party data, Freckle IoT helps brands measure the effectiveness of their advertising by independently matching media spend to in-store visits. Tapad’s technology extends Freckle’s data-set by allowing brands to access additional deterministic and probabilistic data, at scale and across all devices, to analyze consumer behavior ahead of in-store purchase. “Combining our technology with Tapad’s identity-driven solutions was a natural fit for our business,” said Neil Sweeney, founder and CEO at Freckle IoT. “With our unbiased, agnostic measurement and Tapad’s precise and privacy-safe data set, we knew this partnership would be a strong complement to providing more effective results for the needs of our brand partners.” “Freckle IoT is a valuable partner for Tapad as our cross-channel attribution capabilities continue to expand at global scale,” says Chris Feo, SVP, strategy and global partnership at Tapad. “Marketers today need a tool that can address the online and offline disconnect throughout the consumer journey. Freckle’s IoT innovations combined with the Tapad Device Graph help address this need by providing brands, across multiple verticals, accurate and precise identity-driven data powered by true consumer behavior — online and offline.” For more information on Freckle IoT’s measurement offerings, please visit www.freckleiot.com. Contact us today

London – 24 November, 2017 – Tapad, part of Experian, is the leader in cross-device marketing technology and continues to broaden its reach across EMEA. The business today reported a 20 percent growth in the scope of its regional device graph, a data set used by organisations to map consumers to their devices, enabling better, more personalised cross-device marketing. This news complements Tapad’s recent expansion of its UK team with the hire of experienced solutions engineer, Davide Rosamilia. As the demand for cross-device technology solutions continues to grow around the globe, coupled with the emergence of regulations such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Tapad is committed to offering suppliers the greatest level of insight without compromising consumer privacy. Since Tapad started licensing its proprietary Tapad Device GraphTM just over a year ago, demand for the company’s technology has experienced significant growth. New supply partnerships and proactive data sourcing have also meant an increase in devices across key markets, which contribute to the overall 20 percent growth of the EMEA device graph, including a 44 percent increase in the U.K., 47 percent in France, and 85 percent in Germany. “We’re continuing to invest heavily in growing our regional device graph, allowing us to better meet the needs of EMEA marketers as they strive to reach individuals with greater precision in some of the most tightly regulated marketplaces worldwide,” said Tom Rolph, VP EMEA, Tapad. “This year, we have also welcomed 10 new data suppliers whom we’ve helped to increase cross-device amplification, attribution and audience extension, helping to further set us apart in the marketplace and successfully expand our EMEA presence.” Available around the world, the Device Graph provides access to Tapad’s globally compliant and privacy-safe datasets across EMEA, APAC and the U.S., and offers deeper knowledge of consumer preferences, purchase intent, and conversion behaviors. “Tapad has shown a unique ability to adapt to the nuances of the local EMEA market and display impressive growth without sacrificing dedication to privacy,” said Alistair Hill, CEO and Co-founder at On Device Research. “When we started vetting technology vendors, we needed to be sure that we selected a partner that could offer compliant and privacy-safe datasets to operate within our stringent data standards. Tapad’s probabilistic solution offered us greater scale, greater device reach, and increased engagement without compromising on privacy.” Contact us today