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As the days get longer and the weather warms up, spring’s revitalizing energy naturally leads to realignment. For marketers, it’s the perfect moment to reevaluate strategy, especially as consumer behavior changes ahead of summer and brings a renewed interest in travel, outdoor activities, and social events. Making seasonal adjustments to your marketing strategy helps you adapt to these shifting behaviors, capitalize on 2025 marketing trends, and keep your brand relevant year-round.
When it comes to your marketing strategy, spring cleaning means clearing out outdated tactics, optimizing what works, and making room for smarter, more connected solutions. Take the time to ask yourself questions like:
- Are our audiences still relevant?
- Are we activating our data across the right channels?
- Are we collaborating with the right partners and using the right data clean room providers?
If there’s room for improvement, now is the best time to audit, refine, and refresh your marketing strategy before the high-stakes summer and winter seasons. With identity resolution, data enrichment, data clean room collaboration, and omnichannel activation through Experian, you can clean up what’s outdated and prep your strategy for summer success!
Rethink your data and identity resolution strategy
Your data is foundational to your strategy and is a great place to start your marketing strategy spring cleanup. If your customer information is outdated, incomplete, or fragmented across systems, every campaign built on top of it risks underperforming. Before jumping into segmentation, activation, or partnerships, assess the health of your data and identity infrastructure. This is your deep clean and an essential first step in ensuring everything else works better.
With signals disappearing, buying channels proliferating, and customer journeys getting more complex, the key to maintaining addressability is investing in persistent identity, complete consumer data, and collaborative measurement strategies that can weather these changes.
Here are some ways to rethink your marketing data management and identity strategies for the current environment.
Set the data foundation
A solid identity resolution strategy starts with high-quality, unified data. Consider a comprehensive refresh of your customer records by auditing and enhancing what you have for accuracy and depth.
As you’re thinking through spring marketing ideas, it’s an ideal time to enrich your first-party data by appending missing details, removing outdated records, and ensuring you enter summer with reliable, up-to-date profiles.
Data enrichment
Customer data naturally degrades, and eventually, you’ll need to dust it off by supplementing consumer records with current, high-quality insights and attributes. Experian data enrichment can help you seamlessly refresh records with updated demographic and behavioral data, giving detailed insights for precise targeting and relevant campaigns.
With over 5,000 attributes available, covering everything from age and income to shopping habits and media preferences, you can maintain the deepest, most up-to-date view of your consumers through every season.
Offline identity resolution and append
Offline identifiers — like names, physical addresses, and phone numbers — are the most persistent identity markers as they rarely change compared to digital cookies and device IDs. They’re essential for a stable identity foundation, and you can use them to develop a consistent, unified view of each household and individual.
Use this season to audit and tidy up your offline records. Are key identifiers missing? Are you relying on outdated addresses or duplicate names? Experian’s Offline Graph serves as the foundation to help unify those fragmented pieces, resolving identities across households and individuals to create a clean, consistent view of every customer. Think of this step as scrubbing baseboards or cleaning behind the fridge. It’s often overlooked but a prerequisite to a thorough spring refresh.
You can also use Offline Identity Append to append missing identifiers to improve match rates, boost data accuracy, and ensure addressability so that when summer campaigns launch, you’re ready to confidently meet your audience where they are.
Digital resolution via Digital Graph
This next step is like replacing your air filter each spring. You won’t see it, but you’ll definitely feel the difference in performance. Digital resolution ensures persistent, accurate targeting across devices and channels in a fragmented omnichannel environment.
Experian’s Digital Graph facilitates easy consumer identification and connection across the digital ecosystem. Our graph links digital identifiers like mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), connected TV IDs, and hashed emails to consumer profiles. So, when a customer interacts on a smartphone, a smart TV, and a laptop browser, those actions can all be tied back to the same individual or household in your database.
Collaborate securely in data clean rooms to close gaps
Matching partner data within your own secure space, a trusted third-party clean room, or Experian’s privacy-safe environment is an essential next step in your marketing spring cleaning strategy. But what is a data clean room?
A data clean room is a privacy-first way to enhance marketing data in a secure environment that allows brands and partners to match and analyze data without exposing personally identifiable information. It’s almost like organizing a shared closet. You both bring what you have, sort it safely, and leave with something more valuable without mixing up or exposing what’s personal. Secure collaboration enriches your understanding of consumers, boosts match rates, and ensures the highest data security standards.
Here are key data challenges you can tackle through data collaboration—whether in a clean room or across your broader data strategy.
Lack of insights or usable data
Without third-party cookies, marketers run the risk of losing valuable consumer insights. Collaborating with key partners lets brands enrich their first-party data and obtain a more comprehensive view of customer behaviors for informed decision-making.
Let’s say, for example, that an advertiser with sales data but no exposure data struggles to attribute sales to specific campaigns. By collaborating securely with a measurement partner who provides exposure data, the advertiser can confidently link sales to ad exposure and optimize future campaigns with an understanding of who saw their ad and made a purchase.
We anticipate that data collaboration will be a key marketing trend in 2025 alongside signal loss.
Low or no match rates
When businesses handle matching internally, discrepancies like name variations (e.g., John Doe vs. Jonathan Doe) or mismatched identifiers (hashed emails vs. MAIDs) often result in poor match rates. Experian’s identity resolution capabilities, meticulous hygiene processes, resolution logic, and comprehensive identity graphs significantly enhance these match rates.
For example, if a data provider had physical addresses and a demand-side platform (DSP) had email addresses, they couldn’t collaborate with different identifiers. Using Experian Collaboration, however, their data could be resolved with offline identity data from our graph, enabling them to share their collaboration data and improve their marketing efforts.
Data security
When it comes to data collaboration, protecting your proprietary and customer information is non-negotiable. That’s why Experian operates with some of the industry’s strictest data security, privacy, and compliance protocols.
We support identity resolution and data collaboration within the most secure environments available — data clean rooms built to prevent sensitive customer data from ever being exposed. Instead of moving or sharing your raw data, we ensure all records are anonymized before any analysis occurs.
Additionally, Experian’s clean room integrations with trusted partners give clients flexibility without compromising compliance. All solutions are designed to meet GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific data governance standards, with full audit trails and customizable access controls.
Connect and activate
Once your data is clean, enriched, and resolved, the next step is to activate it efficiently across the channels where your audiences spend time. This step is like putting everything back in place after a deep clean so everything is functional, easy to access, and ready to deliver results.
As you get ready to put your spring marketing ideas into motion, it’s time to streamline your activation approach and make sure your customer data is working hard for you.
First-Party Onboarding
With Experian First-Party Onboarding, you can ship data where needed using flexible data solutions for your activation strategy. This step is like labeling and organizing your freshly cleaned marketing closet, so each audience segment is ready to deploy wherever you need it.
We make it easy to:
- Understand your customers on a deeper level
- Seamlessly onboard your customer data for use across programmatic, social, and advanced TV platforms
- Combine your first-party data with Experian syndicated audiences for enriched targeting
- Deliver those audiences to any destination that accepts Experian Audiences — whether a DSP, social platform, or publisher
- Increase match rates, extend reach, and lower activation costs
Transact in the ecosystem with the Experian ID
To aid in the activation process, Experian ID is a unified identifier that acts as a privacy-safe bridge between fragmented emails, device IDs, and addresses, helping you activate audiences across all media channels.
Experian ID keeps your data protected and connected whether you send it to DSPs, social platforms, or data clean rooms. This allows for secure activation and performance tracking across the ecosystem without exposing personally identifiable information (PII).
Like sealing and storing your seasonal belongings in airtight containers, Experian ID keeps your data clean, safe, and always ready for use.
Use fresh audience insights to inform segmentation
After deep-cleaning your data, enriching profiles, and resolving identities, you’ll want to ensure your segmentation reflects that renewed foundation. Just like clearing expired ingredients from your pantry, spring is an ideal time to toss outdated audience definitions and replace them with insights that are fresh, relevant, and ready to perform.
With Experian’s modern audience tools, you can create smarter segments, power omnichannel strategies, and continue reaching high-value consumers even in cookieless environments.
Our marketing data management tools make it easy to:
- Build detailed, personalized profiles using over 5,000+ behavioral and lifestyle marketing attributes that go far beyond basic demographics.
- Choose from 2,400+ pre-built syndicated segments or collaborate with Experian to create custom audiences tailored to your KPIs and campaign goals.
- Append fresh attributes to your CRM to keep profiles accurate, performance-ready, and reflective of current consumer behaviors and life stages.
Together, these tools help sharpen your segmentation strategy and ensure up-to-date audience insights power every campaign. Let’s break down how smart combinations and contextual precision can further elevate your segmentation.
Combine our identity graphs and Marketing Attributes for sharper targeting
Combining Experian’s identity graphs with Marketing Attributes gives you both the who and the why behind your audience and helps you act on that insight with precision. It’s like giving your closet a total spring refresh — not just purging what doesn’t fit but also organizing what’s left into ready-to-wear outfits.
- Digital Graph + Marketing Attributes: Link real-time digital behavior (like CTV, mobile, or web activity) with rich consumer insights to create segments that perform across channels, from mobile to CTV to social.
- Offline Graph + Marketing Attributes: Tie persistent offline identifiers like name and address to behavioral and lifestyle data, making it easier to plan full-funnel strategies from direct mail to digital display.
This approach gives you the clarity and flexibility to build richer personas, reach more qualified audiences, and target with confidence across any environment.
Activate smarter with Contextually-Indexed Audiences
Spring cleaning your strategy also means letting go of legacy tools, especially those relying on cookies or outdated tracking methods.
With Experian’s Contextually-Indexed Audiences, you can reach consumers based on the content they’re engaging with, not their identifiers. We map millions of websites to real audience segments so you can target high-intent consumers in a privacy-safe, way.
For example, an automotive brand looking to reach high-intent luxury EV shoppers can activate Experian’s “in-market for a luxury electric car” segment. With contextually-indexed targeting, that brand’s ads will appear on websites that over-index for visitors in that audience — such as premium car review sites or sustainability-focused blogs — without relying on user identifiers.
This allows the brand to scale performance safely and efficiently in cookieless environments while achieving strong engagement metrics.
Activate across channels with confidence
After refreshing your data, segmentation, and partner strategies, the final step in your spring cleaning is putting all that prep work into action — efficiently and at scale. Think of this as your final sweep: optimizing where and how you activate your audience to ensure every touchpoint is aligned, accurate, and impactful.
With your updated segments and sharpened identity framework in place, you can reach consumers across display, mobile, connected TV (CTV), and emerging digital channels. Experian provides the tools to activate seamlessly — backed by privacy-safe, high-quality data and flexible integration options.
Third-Party Onboarding: Expand reach with external data sets
Experian’s Third-Party Onboarding capabilities make it easy for brands to augment their first-party data strategies on their preferred activation platforms with easy access to high-quality, activation-ready third-party audiences.
For you, this means you no longer have to manage the onboarding process yourself or worry about compatibility. Instead, you can:
- Enhance your first-party targeting with third-party data that’s already privacy-safe and activation-ready.
- Reach more qualified consumers by layering in external behavioral, lifestyle, or intent signals.
- Maximize scale across your preferred platforms using Experian’s established integrations and ecosystem support.
With Experian as your trusted partner, your audience strategy becomes more flexible, more scalable, and more effective, giving you the power to engage the right consumers beyond your own CRM.
Start preparing now for summer campaigns
You’ve cleared out the clutter, restocked your toolkit, and optimized your data strategy, and now, you’re ready to get ahead of the summer rush. While summer is go-time for high-impact marketing campaigns, now is the time to clean, organize, and prepare.
Another reason to start now? Tariffs, inflationary pressures, and changing consumer confidence are already impacting product demand, budget planning, and go-to-market strategies for the rest of the year. Brands need to be ready and agile in the face of economic turbulence.
So, think of this as your final recap checklist before the season (and the economy) changes: a set of intentional steps that ensure all your prep work translates into real performance when it counts.
Start now to:
- Cleanse and enrich your data: Make sure outdated records don’t weigh down your summer outreach. Refresh profiles with Experian’s latest attributes to stay aligned with consumer behavior.
- Solidify your identity resolution strategy: Transition to persistent, privacy-safe identifiers like Experian’s unified ID to maintain addressability across devices and channels.
- Collaborate with key partners: Run pilot campaigns with trusted collaborators to augment your data and maximize scale ahead of peak season.
- Refresh audience segments: Update personas and segments based on the latest data insights.
- Trial omnichannel strategies: Use spring to test messaging across display, CTV, social, and mobile so your summer creative hits with precision.
- Confirm measurement readiness: Double-check attribution and analytics tools so you can optimize in real time and prove ROI.
- Tailor creative to the season: From backyard barbecues to road trips, ensure your messaging taps into the themes and activities consumers care about most this summer.
Spring is the warm-up. Summer is the performance. Start today to improve your marketing data management and overall strategy, and you’ll be ready to hit the ground running.
Let’s plan your seasonal strategy together
Whether you’re looking for more spring marketing ideas or want to launch a high-impact summer campaign, Experian is ready to help. From strategy to segmentation and data clean rooms to real-time activation, we partner with you to build a marketing engine that performs now and keeps growing through the seasons.
Connect with us today, and let’s turn your seasonal refresh into long-term momentum
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Originally appeared in AdExchanger Google’s decision not to deprecate cookies in the Chrome browser after all caused a stir across the industry. Companies invested heavily in developing solutions aligned with the Privacy Sandbox as a survival tactic for the post-cookie landscape. At first glance, Google’s about-face may appear to undercut those efforts. It’s easy, and perhaps even satisfying for some – but inaccurate – to say “all that effort was for nothing.” Given Chrome’s dominance among browsers, AdTech companies had no choice but to prepare for “what if” scenarios. The same goes for cookie deprecation. Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies would have removed a mechanism that has been a cornerstone of addressability for the past 15 years. To be clear, those efforts have not been wasted. They spurred innovation across the AdTech landscape, driving progress in privacy-first targeting, alternative identifiers, supply-path data activation, and real-time data enrichment – all of which will pay dividends for years to come. Whether born directly from Privacy Sandbox participation or inspired by the broader trend toward privacy reform, industry-wide preparation for cookie loss and browser disruption has yielded tangible benefits. Pressure from Google, Apple, and evolving regulations served as a catalyst for modernization that could shape the next decade of advertising technology. An industry anchored in product innovation AdTech is a fundamentally product-driven industry defined by short innovation cycles and the imperative to build and test rapidly. This DNA enables companies to stay resilient, evolve and deliver innovation. Change is good. Disruption can be even better – but only for those who embrace it. Google’s evolving stance on cookies and Privacy Sandbox doesn’t negate what’s been learned. If anything, it underscores the need to keep innovating. The next wave of disruption is likely right around the corner. The payoff While some may argue that the time and effort spent preparing for cookie loss was wasted, those efforts have functioned as a forcing mechanism for several innovations in data activation. Supply-side data activation and optimization, aka “curation,” is an alternative to the traditional approach to data activation. Unlike the traditional data management platform (DMP) to demand-side platform (DSP) activation flow, curation allows buyers to utilize supply-path data more directly. The upshot? Improved performance and pricing for media agencies and brand advertisers. As curation continues to evolve, it’s poised to play a central role in how advertisers and publishers transact. Real-time data enrichment is another area that has benefited from this period of accelerated innovation. Many companies were compelled to improve their tech stacks to align with Sandbox protocols. These updates, particularly in real-time data enrichment capabilities, are now laying the groundwork for future data activation strategies across both the buy and sell-sides. Exiting out of tunnel vision Over the past five years, the AdTech industry has invested deeply in planning for a future without cookies. Still those investments have been well worth it. While cookies are not going away, the broader deprecation of signal continues. The work that was done to prepare will inevitably inform the next evolution of our industry. Contact us Latest posts
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: PMG By using Audigent’s curated PMP approach in combination with Experian audience data, they delivered campaigns that were 44% more cost-efficient across CTV. Boiron For Boiron, a homeopathic brand, using curated media buying reduced data costs by 30% and beat CPA goals for both video and display by more than 40%. Index Exchange Publishers benefit, too. When Index Exchange included Audigent-curated inventory in their PMPs, they saw an average 70% revenue lift for mobile and a 13% lift for CTV. 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. Connect with us Latest posts
Curation — the intelligent packaging of data and inventory actionable in a private marketplace deal — can no longer be considered a trend or buzzword. With over 66% of all open exchange – representing $100 billion in annual spend – being transacted through private marketplace deals (PMPs), curation is a key part of how data and identity are addressed and actioned in programmatic media. Programmatic advertising is certainly known for big shifts, but as shared by Index Exchange CEO Andrew Casale, “Curation will be bigger than header bidding and as big as programmatic or real-time bidding (RTB) – that’s our bet.” And we agree. But why has curation become a critical component of brands and media agencies\’ digital advertising strategies? Put simply, the math. Case study after case study empirically shows curation performs well for both the buy and sell-sides. For media agencies and brands, curation consistently shows four main benefits: Significant cost efficiencies Buying curated PMPs shows significant cost efficiencies when compared to buying data from the buy-side alone. Strong performance Data-enriched, curated PMPs can be optimized through the supply path, unlike a data management platform (DMP) segment, which leads to strong performance. Futureproofs media buying When data is curated through the supply path, it does not need to rely on legacy identifiers (like cookies), and the door is open to robust, next-gen addressability which better futureproofs media buying opportunities. Value-added insights Curation comes with robust log-level data that can be used for value-added data science including analytics, insights, reporting, and attribution – all critical in a world where addressability and identity resolution are becoming even more challenging. Curation introduced efficiency into homeopathic brand Boiron’s media buys, reducing the brand’s data costs by 30%, which enabled the brand to reinvest the same budget in brand awareness goals. Curation not only met but also exceeded the CPA for display by 82% and for video by 41%. “Audigent has been a top 5 performer in terms of CPA during our testing, helping our teams deliver 44% more efficient spend for brands across CTV campaigns.\”Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at agency PMG A big boost for addressability Legacy identity signals are changing. Whether it’s by browser, device, or platform, both buy-side and sell-side platforms need strong identity signals to reach their intended audiences, and this has become harder than ever before. Curation, with its real-time data connection and enrichment capabilities, solves signal loss challenges by directly connecting to the supply path and using a broader spectrum of identity solutions to boost addressability. Curation allows platforms to target first-party, third-party, contextual, indexed and modeled audiences. This alleviates the dependence on any one identifier and boosts the relevant bidding opportunities for brands and media agencies to target audiences. Not all curation is created equally As with any hot innovation, AdTech is notorious for companies jumping on the bandwagon of the largest trends. Curation is no different, with seemingly everyone now claiming to be a “curator.” As the industry works to define what is and isn’t “curation,\” we are uniquely positioned to define this as Audigent has pioneered curation for seven years and is the industry leader. The definition of curation is the intelligent packaging and optimization of data curated against the inventory supply path. There are three definitional elements to any curation product: Unique audience data Curation must include first-party, third-party, contextual, indexed and/or modeled data. Robust SSP integration To apply data in real-time to the inventory supply path, a curator must have deep partnerships and integrations that enable the combination of data and inventory into a single package. Optimization The whole point of curating data against the supply path is that it opens the door for robust real-time optimization to drive performance. If the solution ticks all three boxes, then brands and agencies should test curation and gauge its results firsthand. Curation done right drives results for brands, agencies, and publishers When done well, curation improves media buying efficiency and performance for brands and agencies. Importantly, it also drives results for publishers and content creators. Advertisers realize average data segment savings of 36-81% when using PMPs over the open exchange (Internal data) Advertisers see 10-70% lower CPC, 1.5x-3.0x higher CTR, and 10-30% higher video completion rate when using data-enriched PMPs over the open exchange (Internal data) When including their inventory in curated PMPs, publishers see an average 70% revenue uplift for mobile and 13% for connected TV (CTV) Beyond voting with budgets, media agencies and brands are also weighing in on the curation conversation: “Our Conditions Marketplace strategies have driven a 48% improvement in eCPM and a 26% improvement in CPA across our pharma client portfolio as of May 2024. For one client, we saw ROAS improve by 58% compared to their overall omnichannel performance while maintaining quality. These results aren’t outliers—they’re proof that curation is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have for marketers who want performance, precision, and scale working in lockstep.”Amanda DeVito, Butler/Till Industry-leading curation with Experian Tapping into an end-to-end solution that enables marketers to understand and reach their desired customers across channels through curation is a win-win for all parties. In the past three years, Experian and curation company Audigent have delivered a range of industry-leading innovations together, including the integration of Experian data into Audigent’s PMPs. As one company now, Experian\’s unique identity and data capabilities amplify how curation activates on the buy-side at scale, setting a new standard for audience targeting with added benefits like audience customization and flexible activation through Audigent’s PMPs or demand-side platforms. Connect with us Latest posts