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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When it comes to your marketing strategy, spring cleaning means clearing out outdated tactics, optimizing what works, and making room for smarter, more connected solutions.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data enrichment, data clean room collaboration, and omnichannel activation through Experian, you can clean up what’s outdated and prep your strategy for summer success!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 If your customer information is outdated, incomplete, or fragmented across systems, every campaign built on top of it risks underperforming.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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Marketers are searching for better ways to connect with their audiences across screens and prove results. Optimum Media is at the forefront of this development, helping brands plan, activate, and measure campaigns across linear TV, addressable TV, connected TV (CTV), digital, and social platforms. To support this approach, Optimum Media partners with Experian, combining their subscriber data with Experian’s trusted audience and identity solutions. Together, we help brands not only find the right consumers but also understand their behaviors and measure real outcomes. Here’s how Optimum Media and Experian are working together. Build a complete customer view with rich data from Experian Optimum Media starts with strong first-party data, including viewership and exposure information from millions of households. However, reaching a deeper understanding of these audiences requires more than what subscriber records alone can offer. Through Experian’s Marketing Attributes, Optimum Media gains access to thousands of demographic and behavioral attributes to its data sets. These attributes—such as income ranges, lifestyle interests, and retail purchasing behaviors—help advertisers build a more complete view of the consumer. "We work with trusted partners like Experian to deliver the additional audience insights—like demographics and lifestyle—that are critical for our clients' success."Natalia Irmin, Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships, Optimum Media Combining Experian’s Marketing Attributes with Optimum Media’s subscriber footprint helps brands segment audiences more precisely, develop refined media plans, and tailor messaging based on the real behaviors and interests of consumers. Move beyond basic targeting with Audience Engine To support more personalized and scalable targeting, Optimum Media uses Audience Engine—Experian’s self-service platform for audience management and activation. Through Audience Engine, Optimum Media can: Access Experian’s syndicated audiences Not just what’s available directly on their platform. Build custom segments Using Experian’s demographic and behavioral insights. Tap into our data marketplace To explore additional segments from Experian and our Partner Audiences through trusted third-party providers. These tools give Optimum Media and its clients the ability to move beyond basic targeting. Whether a brand wants to reach families preparing for back-to-school shopping, in-market car buyers, or upscale consumers planning home renovations, Audience Engine makes it possible to identify and activate those audiences with greater accuracy—based on real data, not guesswork. Extend campaign reach with Experian’s Digital Graph While Optimum Media has a substantial owned footprint, they often work with advertisers who need to extend reach beyond traditional subscriber bases. To support this, they rely on Experian’s Digital Graph. Our Digital Graph connects mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), IP addresses, CTV IDs, and hashed emails into unified household and individual profiles. This enables Optimum Media to identify and reach audiences outside of their network with the same level of accuracy as inside it. For even deeper audience insights, Digital Graph can be bundled with Marketing Attributes. This combination helps advertisers go beyond basic targeting to include real-world behaviors like shopping habits, travel preferences, and lifestyle characteristics. The result: campaigns that do more than deliver impressions—they connect with the right households across any channel. Turn viewership into measurable business outcomes One of the biggest challenges in multiscreen advertising is connecting exposure to real business results. With Experian’s solutions, Optimum Media can: Plan based on audience behaviors across screens, not just age and gender demographics. Activate household-level audiences across linear, CTV, digital, and social. Measure campaign performance using unduplicated reach, frequency, and attribution across devices. By offering advertisers access to a more complete consumer profile and maintaining consistent measurement across channels, Optimum Media and Experian help clients make better decisions about where to spend and how to adjust strategies over time. Why the Optimum Media and Experian partnership delivers Deeper audience understanding: By combining first-party viewership with Experian’s demographic and behavioral data, advertisers gain a fuller picture of who they are reaching. Seamless cross-platform execution: Identity solutions like Digital Graph allow brands to reach audiences across multiple devices and channels without losing precision. "Optimum Media has been instrumental in helping Experian strengthen the precision, quality, and real-world applications of our data. Their ongoing feedback is invaluable in making sure our solutions continue to meet client needs and perform at the highest level."Chris Feo, Chief Business Officer, Experian With a single, trusted partner offering both identity and audience solutions, Optimum Media avoids the complexity many advertisers still face when piecing together different data sets and vendors. “Having Experian’s identity and audience solutions under one roof makes it easier for us to plan, reach, and measure across every channel. It’s a complete solution that simplifies advertising and improves performance.”Natalia Irmin, Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships, Optimum Media Start building better campaigns with Experian Ready to improve your audience targeting and measurement strategies like Optimum Media? Connect with our team today to learn how Marketing Attributes, Audience Engine, Digital Graph, and our other solutions can help you build stronger, more measurable advertising campaigns. Connect with us About Optimum Media Optimum Media is a multiscreen advertising business that partners with small and medium businesses, as well as national, political, media and entertainment, and agency clients across the United States. They work with advertisers to develop custom multiscreen advertising solutions powered by proprietary technology and a massive aggregated database of audience data points and TV viewership data. Latest posts
Originally appeared in The Current Forget the cookie delay — AI is already rewriting the rules of advertising. While the industry was busy debating yet another postponement of Chrome’s third-party cookie phaseout, AI quietly became the most disruptive force in marketing. But here’s the twist: AI doesn’t work without identity. If marketers want results — real outcomes, not just impressions — they need to prioritize the data that makes AI go. First-party data strategies are now mainstream. Interoperable identity solutions like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2) and ID5 are gaining adoption across the open web. Connected TV (CTV) has grown into a performance-focused, cookieless channel. Contextual and geo-based targeting have become smarter and more scalable. Identity graphs are helping marketers stitch together signals across devices, platforms, and channels. The foundation for a better ecosystem isn’t being built — it’s already here. The AI hype is over — and the stakes are higher It’s no longer buzz. AI is here, and it’s already reshaping how we plan, activate, and measure advertising. We’re seeing the rise of agentic AI: systems that don’t just surface insights but act on them. These AI agents are identifying patterns, building audiences, optimizing media buys, and analyzing performance. AI is helping marketers stop guessing and start improving. But there’s a catch — one we can’t afford to overlook. AI is only as good as the data it works with. “Garbage in, garbage out.” as the saying goes. And in advertising, that means if you don’t know who you’re reaching, even the smartest AI won’t drive results. To unlock AI’s full potential, marketers need a strong, privacy-safe identity foundation. Identity is the fuel that makes AI work AI can personalize creative, optimize in-flight campaigns, and even recommend which channels to prioritize — but it can’t do any of that well without context. And context starts with identity. Identity connects signals from different devices, logins, channels, and interactions to real people. It tells your AI models who you’re talking to — not just what they clicked. That kind of clarity gives AI the power to make smarter predictions, uncover insights, and deliver relevance at scale. Without identity, AI is guessing. With identity, it’s delivering. Identity is the foundation of the outcomes era We’re living in a performance-driven age. Impressions and clicks are no longer enough. Marketers today are being judged by real outcomes: incremental sales, customer acquisition, revenue lift, and long-term value. To measure those outcomes, you need to know who you reached — and whether they took action. Identity makes that connection possible. It links ad exposure to real-world results. It enables accurate attribution across channels. It powers personalization at every stage of the journey, making every impression more valuable. This is the outcomes era, and identity is what makes it measurable. Commerce media and CTV show what’s possible Two of the fastest-growing channels — commerce media and CTV — are great examples of identity in action. Commerce media In commerce media, identity helps retailers and marketplaces organize their customer data, enrich it with external insights, and activate it across their own sites and off-site channels. It makes accurate targeting possible and gives marketers a clear ROI they can prove. CTV In CTV, identity helps solve a fundamental challenge: turning anonymous viewers into addressable audiences. On free ad-supported streaming platforms (FAST), identity solutions resolve viewership to the household level. On logged-in platforms, identity enriches profiles with behavioral and purchase data, boosting demand, improving CPMs, and growing revenue. At Experian, we’ve invested in this future. Our recent acquisition of Audigent brings together data, identity, and activation — under one roof — built to support both AI-driven planning and outcome-based performance. How marketers can win now To stay ahead in a world defined by AI and outcomes, marketers need to: Invest in omnichannel identity To unify signals across platforms and environments. Make identity actionable in real time To inform both targeting and measurement. Utilize first-party data, clean rooms, and privacy-safe partnerships To future-proof performance. Tailor identity strategies To fit their media mix — because what works in CTV may not apply to in-app or web. It’s not about rebuilding everything. It’s about building on what’s already working. Final thought: Identity is the bridge AI is raising the bar, and outcomes are the new standard. But neither works without identity. The marketers who win won’t treat identity as a compliance checkbox — they’ll treat it as their competitive edge. Get started with us today Latest posts
As marketers gear up for the 2025 holiday season, economic turbulence, tariffs, and shifting digital habits are changing how and where consumers shop. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still set to be the crown jewels of retail, but winning this year means leaning into data, omnichannel activation, and tools that help you do more with less as you start your Black Friday planning. Let’s explore this year’s Black Friday trends in relation to last year’s and how to make the most of every opportunity in the 2025 holiday season. Download our 2025 holiday shopping report Spending trends we saw in 2024 After years of economic uncertainty, Black Friday 2024 marked a return to retail “normalcy” with record-setting online and in-store shopping that reflected growing optimism and smarter behaviors: Online Black Friday sales increased by 10.2% from 2023, largely due to better-timed deals and earlier shopping. Mobile shopping made up 69% of global purchases. In-store traffic rebounded, surpassing online during Cyber Week for the first time in years. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) added $686 million to online sales — an 8.8% YoY increase — as consumers spread out their holiday spending. Retailers using AI tools (like chatbots and shopping assistants) saw up to 15% more conversions. Ultimately, last year’s Black Friday e-commerce trends showed that shoppers prioritized flexible payments, value, and easy, personalized buying experiences. Key products and categories in 2024 After years of favoring lower-cost essentials, consumers returned to higher-ticket purchases during Cyber Week. The share of expensive goods sold online rose over 15% compared to pre-season figures, with AI-powered product recommendations leading consumers to top-selling products like: AirPods Pro Ninja Creami Our Place Always Pan Vitamix blenders Oura Ring The highest-performing gift categories included electronics, apparel, furniture and bedding, groceries, and cosmetics. 2024 Black Friday trends we expect to continue in 2025 As we reflect on a record-breaking 2024 holiday season, we predict many of the key Cyber Monday trends and Black Friday strategies for retailers in 2024 will carry over and intensify in 2025: Mobile will remain the primary shopping channel. The shift to early shopping will persist. AI-driven efficiencies will play an increasing role. Retailers that focus on the customer experience will capture the most wallet share. As a marketer, you can use these insights to plan your Black Friday e-commerce strategy and meet audiences where and when they scroll and shop. Projected growth YoY While 2025 holiday retail shopping may not match the explosive growth of 2023 to 2024, consumers are still expected to show up in force for Black Friday in 2025. The National Retail Federation projects that overall U.S. holiday sales will rise between 2.7% and 3.7% compared to last year. Experian’s 2025 Q1 consumer data paints a more nuanced picture: Mass retail transactions remain above 2024 levels, but YoY growth is slowing, from +8% in January to +4% in May. Department stores, which grew 10% YoY in January, have since declined to -3% by May. Apparel saw a similar trajectory, slipping from +7% growth in Q1 to slightly negative growth leading up to the summer months. This slowdown suggests early signs of consumer fatigue, especially in discretionary categories, as inflation and tariffs continue to erode the spending power of price-sensitive consumers and small brands that rely heavily on imports. Emerging trends and behaviors to expect in 2025 With inflation still weighing on household budgets and new tariffs potentially reducing consumer spending power by up to $78 billion, brands and shoppers are entering the holiday season with uncertainty. Roughly 91% of consumers may adjust their buying habits in response to tariff-driven price increases and inflation. Consumers are still motivated by value, but they’ll expect more for their money and may start deal-hunting even earlier this season. You’ll need to be agile with your messaging, inventory, and budget allocation, as shoppers will still spend when the experience is seamless, personalized, and smart. Let’s explore the key trends shaping the 2025 holiday season and how you can build them into your omnichannel marketing plan before the rush hits. Omnichannel campaigns In 2025, holiday shoppers will be more intentional than impulsive, which means they may zigzag between channels — browsing products on TikTok, watching TV ads, researching on Google, and checking out in-store or online before purchasing. They’ll want consistent, personalized experiences no matter where they engage. This means you can’t rely on a single sales touchpoint anymore and must deliver a seamless experience wherever your audience spends time. Forrester shows 21% of global B2C leaders are already prioritizing omnichannel, which makes it a competitive necessity. Fortunately, these efforts pay off. Omnichannel shoppers spend 1.5x more per month than those who shop on a single channel. How Experian helps Experian simplifies omnichannel marketing. Our identity graph connects hashed emails, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), connected TV (CTV) IDs, and more so you can define your audience once and reach them consistently across every major channel. With unified data, identity, and activation, we help you cut through platform silos and deliver coordinated, cross-device campaigns that actually feel connected. Mobile first In 2024, over 70% of orders and $195 billion in sales happened on mobile devices, according to Salesforce. As more consumers browse holiday deals from the couch, car, or checkout line, mobile-first shopping is among the top Cyber Monday retail trends and the main channel for on-the-go purchases. For marketers, this means your mobile experience can make or break your Black Friday results. Responsive design, fast load times, and smooth checkout flows are the new expectations. Brands that invest in sleek mobile sites, intuitive apps, and frictionless buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options will better meet and convert customers where they are at key moments. How Experian helps With Experian, you can reach mobile-first shoppers precisely at scale. Our identity graph connects MAIDs to individuals, so you can activate campaigns across mobile apps, SMS, and social with confidence. Define your audience once and deliver consistently personalized offers wherever they scroll, search, or shop. CTV On Black Friday 2025, shoppers won’t just be scrolling — they’ll be streaming, too. CTV continues to surge as a key channel for holiday shoppers, with viewership far outpacing ad spend. In 2024, CTV drove 31% of digital audience activation revenue. With nearly half of U.S. viewers expected to tune into free ad-supported TV (FAST) in 2025, CTV is becoming a core part of the Black Friday media mix. Still, many marketers underestimate the channel, assuming it’s strictly an upper-funnel awareness channel rather than a direct driver of conversions. In reality, CTV can influence high-intent holiday shoppers closer to purchase than many assume. With more consumers engaging with FAST during the holidays, CTV offers scalable, measurable reach and can fuel conversions across the entire funnel. And when paired with identity resolution and cross-device targeting, it becomes a powerful full-funnel tool. How Experian helps Experian gives marketers the household-level insights and activation capabilities to reach the right shoppers at the right frequency across platforms — a must for a high-volume weekend like Black Friday. Our identity graph connects devices within a household to manage frequency, unify messaging, and eliminate waste. Plus, with support for Universal IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2), you can activate audiences across CTV environments — including FAST — using login-based, privacy-compliant signals for a campaign that connects, converts, and performs on the biggest shopping weekend of the year. Signal loss Although Google has reversed its plan to phase out third-party cookies, 40% of browser traffic no longer supports them. You now need various identifiers across devices and platforms to get a complete customer view, especially during Black Friday when reach and precision are key. That’s why marketers are shifting to alternative IDs like UID2, ID5, and Hadron ID to maintain reach. In 2024, we saw a 50% increase in Experian clients using alternative IDs and a 30% jump in the number resolved to individuals in our Digital Graph. These IDs are unlocking up to 60% incremental reach in campaigns compared to cookies. Preparing a multi-ID approach and incorporating privacy-first strategies, such as contextual targeting, can give you a competitive edge this holiday season. How Experian helps Experian’s identity solutions connect all your digital and offline identifiers into a single, privacy-forward customer profile. This lets you recognize and reach your audiences no matter what device or platform they’re using. Plus, with Contextually-Indexed Audiences, you can activate high-performing segments instantly in major demand-side platforms (DSPs) without cookies to maintain and improve addressability during the holidays. RMNs Retail media networks (RMNs) are set to capture 20% of digital ad spend in 2025. In particular, off-site retail media is expected to surge 42.1% this year, driving more Black Friday campaigns into channels like CTV, programmatic, and social. This shift reflects a growing demand for full-funnel strategies, broader reach, and cross-channel measurement. RMNs that extend their first-party data beyond owned platforms will be best positioned to deliver results during peak shopping periods like Cyber Week. However, off-site success hinges on clean, connected data. Many RMNs still face fragmented views of their customers, making it harder to scale audiences and measure performance. How Experian helps Experian helps RMNs scale off-site by resolving fragmented identities, enriching first-party data, and enabling seamless activation across channels. Our identity graph connects key digital identifiers to unify customer profiles, while our audience insights add depth with demographic, behavioral, and purchase data. Curation Curation is quickly becoming a go-to Black Friday marketing strategy, helping advertisers connect with high-value audiences by blending inventory with audience and contextual data. In fact, by 2026, private marketplace ad spending is projected to grow by $31 billion. Instead of choosing between wide-open auctions or direct publisher deals, curation offers a powerful middle ground through curated private marketplaces (PMPs) built on first-party publisher data, contextual signals, and alternative IDs. How Experian helps Now unified with Audigent, Experian is setting a new standard for curated media buying. Our Curated Deals combine Experian’s powerful identity and data capabilities with Audigent’s flexible activation and audience customization. You can activate high-performing audiences across DSPs or directly through Audigent’s PMPs to maximize precision, privacy, and scale ahead of the biggest shopping week of the year. AI-powered shopping experiences AI is becoming a co-pilot for holiday shoppers and reshaping the customer journey. From researching gift ideas and comparing prices to relying on personalized product recommendations and AI chatbots for faster service, consumers are using AI to shop smarter. Salesforce reports that AI influenced 19% of holiday purchases in 2024 — a 6% increase from the previous year. In an Experian survey, shoppers shared they’re also using AI to help with BOPIS logistics and even choosing which BNPL option to use at checkout. Influencer content powered by AI and social algorithms is also guiding purchases in real time. This holiday season, brands that weave AI into their digital storefronts, payment options, and social strategies will drive conversion. How Experian helps Experian uses AI and machine learning to help marketers deliver faster, smarter Black Friday campaigns. Our Digital Graph improves targeting with advanced household connections, while machine learning models fill in data gaps and identify high-intent shoppers. We also offer AI-powered audience recommendations and real-time contextual signals, enabling you to quickly build and activate the right segments at scale. How to prepare for Black Friday 2025 Now that we’ve covered Black Friday trends for this year, it’s time to talk about how you can build them into a data-powered marketing strategy. Here’s where we suggest you focus your Black Friday planning for Cyber Week 2025. Understand and segment your audience Winning Black Friday 2025 starts with knowing your audience and how they shop so you can reach them at optimal times with messaging that resonates. Whether you're targeting early-bird deal hunters or last-minute gifters, audience precision is the foundation for success this holiday season — and Experian can help. Purchase intent Drive performance by identifying consumers actively in the market for holiday purchases. With Experian’s holiday shopping audiences (available across major DSPs and platforms like Audigent, The Trade Desk, and DirectTV), you can reach: Last-Minute Shoppers One-Stop Holiday Shoppers Post-Holiday Shoppers Heavy Gift Givers These intent-rich segments can help you capture demand at every phase of the season. Spending behavior While some consumers may splurge this year, others are tightening their belts due to economic turbulence. Experian’s pre-built holiday audiences help you target accordingly, with segments like: Holiday High Spenders and Moderate Spenders Big Box/Club Stores Discount Holiday Shoppers, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Shoppers These segments can help you optimize campaign spend based on wallet size. Channel preferences Knowing where your audience shops is just as important as how much they spend or what they buy. Experian offers audiences like: eCommerce Diehards Brick-and-Mortar Diehards Impulse Buyers BOPIS Shoppers Tailor your media mix and creative strategy to align with their channel behavior, whether they’re browsing in-store, online, or on social. Demographic, lifestyle, and behavioral data Experian helps you tap into rich demographic and lifestyle data to better understand and engage high-value segments, whether that’s suburban deal hunters, Gen Z beauty buyers, or luxury holiday splurgers. And by layering in Experian Marketing Attributes — 5,000+ attributes that include financial behaviors, interests, shopping patterns, car ownership, media consumption, and more — you can gain a clearer picture of age, gender, purchase behaviors, and content habits for refined holiday targeting. With our data marketplace, audiences are more accessible and actionable than ever. We offer: Diverse, high-fidelity partner audiences Easily activate audiences from 31+ premium data providers, including: Attain: Real-time, permissioned transaction data from 8 million U.S. consumers Alliant: Predictive audiences built from billions of consumer transactions across key verticals Circana: Loyalty-based CPG and general merchandise audiences Dun & Bradstreet: Privacy-compliant B2B audiences based on firmographic and professional attributes Flexible activation across top platforms Our identity graph powers our data marketplace, enabling audiences to be easily activated and highly addressable across display, mobile, and CTV with 10+ activation platforms, including Madhive, Open AP, Optimum, and Yieldmo. Privacy-first audience planning All data in our marketplace meets strict privacy and compliance standards, helping brands scale campaigns confidently. Custom and pre-built audience options Mix and match from 2,400+ Experian Audiences and Partner Audiences to find the right shoppers and meet your campaign goals. Our data marketplace delivers the people you want to reach, where you need to reach them, with the insights to optimize in real time. Personalize promotions One-size-fits-all promotions won’t cut it in 2025. Consumers expect relevance at every touchpoint and ignore what feels generic or off-base. With the abundance of Black Friday offers, shoppers are filtering fast and prioritizing brands that understand their needs, preferences, and timing. Here’s how you can deliver on these demands: Deliver targeted product recommendations: Whether through chatbots or personalized emails, consumers want help quickly finding what they need. Brands that invest in smart recommendation engines position themselves to drive cart additions and increase average order value (AOV). Customize promo codes by segment: Everyone loves discounts, but not all shoppers should get the same one. Use customer segments like high-spenders, last-minute shoppers, or deal-hunters from Experian’s syndicated holiday audiences to offer custom promo codes, boost conversions, and avoid over-discounting with those who would buy regardless. Optimize the timing of offers: Timing is everything during Cyber Week when inboxes and feeds are flooded. Use our behavioral and lifestyle data to determine when your segments are most active and likely to buy, and schedule your best offers for maximum impact. Use Experian Activity Feed: Black Friday 2025 will span devices, stores, and channels. Activity Feed connects the dots between online ad exposures and offline sales, helping you measure the impact of your campaigns and identify what drives conversions. Case study: How Cuebiq increased match rates with Activity Feed Using Activity Feed, Cuebiq, resolved digital ad exposures to MAIDs so they could know the impact of their campaigns on in-store visits and purchases. Within three weeks, they resolved 85% of ad events to households across web, mobile, and CTV, giving their clients a clearer view of what drove store traffic and sales. “In just a few weeks, they were able to maximize the match rate across the fragmented digital inventory, solving a huge problem when it comes to cross-channel attribution.”Luca Bocchiardi, Director of Product, Cuebiq Experian can help you win big this holiday season Marketers are entering this season with more pressure, more complexity, and more opportunity than ever before. Whether you're grappling with signal loss, evolving your omnichannel mix, or launching your first curated PMP, Experian has the data, identity infrastructure, and activation tools to help you win. Download our 2025 Holiday spending trends and insights report, in collaboration with GroundTruth, to access our predictions for this year's holiday season. Download now Want help building your Black Friday marketing strategy? Let’s talk. Latest posts