At this year’s Shoptalk, one thing was crystal clear: Retailers are no longer just competing on price or product—they’re competing on experience. And in that race, customer expectations are not just the starting line—they’re the finish line, too.
Over three days of discussions, demos, and side conversations, Shoptalk 2025 delivered a fresh look at how brands and advertisers are adapting to an increasingly blended retail environment. The show spotlighted not just what’s new in retail media and AdTech—but how the industry is rethinking the entire shopper journey.
What we heard again and again on the ground was this: there is no one-size-fits-all playbook anymore. Every retailer is navigating their own unique mix of identity, data, tech, and consumer needs. The winners will be those who stay nimble while staying connected to what customers actually want.
Experience is everything
Across sessions and show floor chats, the core message was this: customers expect more—and retailers must rise to meet that moment. Whether it’s a personalized in-store interaction or a seamless connected TV (CTV) ad experience, people want value, inspiration, and storytelling wherever they shop. That means digital and physical channels must work together effortlessly.
Retailers aren’t just “digitizing” the in-store experience anymore—they’re rethinking how to make the entire shopping journey feel easy, consistent, and enjoyable. This shift isn’t just about touchpoints. It’s about changing the way retailers think about the customer experience.
Loyalty isn’t a program, it’s every interaction
Loyalty emerged as a major theme—one that goes well beyond points and perks. Speakers from Wayfair, DSW, and Lowe’s emphasized that every customer interaction, not just formal programs, should be viewed as an opportunity to build emotional loyalty. Sarah Crockett, CMO of DSW, shared that emotional tactics resonate more deeply than transactional rewards—echoing a broader shift toward customer-centric, experience-driven engagement.
“Loyalty today isn’t just about perks. It’s about trust, connection, and knowing your customer on a deeper level. Every interaction is a chance to build that relationship.”
Sam Zahedi, Sr. Enterprise Partnerships Manager
Retail media gets real
Retail media networks (RMNs) took center stage, but the tone is changing. With so many players flooding the space, retailers and advertisers alike are asking tougher questions: How do you stand out? How do you prove value? And perhaps most critically—how do you build trust?
Standardization came up in several sessions, but as Harvey Ma from Sam’s Club MAP pointed out, standardization alone won’t fix what’s been lost: foundational trust and transparency. Advertisers want more than impressions—they want insights, outcomes, and measurement they can count on.
“There’s no one playbook—nor should there be. Every retailer, every RMN, and every customer is different. Success comes from building strategies as unique as the audiences they serve.”
Anne Passon, Sr. Director, Sales, Retail
Many brands came to our team asking how Experian can help extend their audiences into new environments like social and CTV. Here’s how we do it:
- We work with our RMN partners to take their organized, clean, complete, and highly usable customer records and expand them to include other digital identifiers. By adding digital IDs such as hashed emails (HEMs), mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), CTV IDs, and Universal IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2) or ID5, we ensure that the retailer’s entire customer base can be reached.
- On their own, RMNs only know the digital identity of a portion of their customer base. With Experian’s help, they can add digital IDs to their entire customer base.
- As a result, marketers can reach all of an RMN’s customers, including those whose identities were previously unknown. They can reach these customers both onsite and offsite, thanks to the array of addressable IDs we provide. This increase in addressability leads to higher revenue for the RMN.
Moving at the speed of people
One of the most thought-provoking moments came from Nikki Laughlin from McClatchy Media during a Brand Innovators session. She asked a simple but powerful question: How can we move at the speed of people if we’re always looking backward at data?
It’s a challenge we’re hearing more often—marketers want to be proactive, not just reactive. That requires faster insights, cleaner connections between signals, and a shift from static audiences to living, evolving ones.
Experian’s identity and data solutions aren’t just about better targeting—they’re about helping brands activate smarter, faster, and with more confidence across the full media ecosystem.
A marketplace of possibilities
The best part of Shoptalk? The spontaneous moments. The side conversations where ideas turned into opportunities. We had several discussions that signaled new partnerships on the horizon—some with current clients, others brand new. What united them was a desire to co-create: to build something more tailored, more agile, more customer-first.
Of course, there were also shared challenges. Retailers are navigating how to stay customer-centric while grappling with complex, sometimes controversial tech—from AI to influencers to evolving data privacy norms.
But if there was one consistent thread, it was this: retailers are hungry for clarity and collaboration.
Forget the playbook, follow the customer
Shoptalk 2025 reminded us that while tech and trends come and go, the most successful retail strategies still start with one thing: knowing your customer. That’s what fuels smarter activation, stronger measurement, and more meaningful experiences—whether online, in-store, or across emerging media channels.
If you’re rethinking your retail strategy or want to explore how Experian can support your goals across identity, retail media, or CTV, let’s talk.
Let’s connect and explore what’s possible
Latest posts
Commerce media has recently established itself as a significant player in the AdTech industry. What is it and why should you care?
Originally appeared on MarTech Series Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today's complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers. We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever. This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer. Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed. 2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet. The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising. This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach. 2015-2020: The age of walled gardens From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments. However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms. The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web. 2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking. Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments. Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape. With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer. 2025: The omnichannel imperative Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up. The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable. Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Adapting to the future of identity The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant. Explore our identity solutions Contact us Latest posts
We spoke with experts from Audigent, Choreograph, Goodway Group, MiQ, Snowflake about the future of data and identity.