Brands have spent years strengthening identity. That was the right move. A stronger identity foundation gives marketers a better chance to understand people, shape audiences, and connect media to outcomes.
Yet I see many teams hit the same wall after that work is done. Performance breaks at activation.
I think of it as the activation gap. It’s the distance between knowing who you want to reach and being able to act on that intelligence across channels in a privacy-safe, measurable way. For many brands, identity is stronger than it was a few years ago. The challenge now is carrying that signal cleanly from data into execution, and from execution into outcomes.
Identity was the first step
For a long stretch, the industry was focused on rebuilding identity. That made sense. Marketers needed a more durable foundation for audience strategy, activation, and measurement.
Now the market is in a different phase. First-party data can’t stop at organization in a CRM, it has to be usable in market as an addressable audience that can move across digital, TV, social, and commerce environments.
That shift sounds straightforward. In practice, this is where the process starts to break down.
A pharma brand may already have patient or consumer records, onboarding capability, and audience segmentation. It may be able to launch awareness messaging in a few channels. The harder part is turning that foundation into a connected strategy it can carry into market from start to finish.
That has direct implications for growth. When signal degrades between planning and execution, media becomes less efficient, optimization slows down, and it gets harder to connect audience decisions to business results.
The gap is operational
Closing the gap starts with making identity usable in market, not just accurate on paper.
A pharma marketing team may know which audiences it needs to reach, have a view of likely demand, and know which channels are in play. None of that creates value if the path from audience creation to activation is disconnected.
Modern marketing should be judged by connected execution. Data has to move cleanly into activation. Activation has to stay close enough to measurement so teams can unify cross-channel exposure, build a clearer view of consumer behavior, and connect campaign exposure back to outcomes with more accuracy in near real-time.
That’s the part many organizations are still working through. They’ve invested in the foundation. The system above it still feels too fragmented to carry signal from start to finish.
Complex markets raise the stakes
This pressure is even more visible in regulated categories.
In health and finance, brands need more than audience access. They need privacy-safe activation, strong governance, and outcome visibility that can stand up to scrutiny. They need a way to carry audience intelligence across environments without losing control of how that signal is used.
In these categories, weak connections between identity, activation, and outcomes create hesitation, and hesitation is expensive.
What closing the gap looks like
Closing the gap starts with a fuller view of the consumer across channels.
Most brands already have valuable first-party data. The challenge is whether they have enough insight to make it activation-ready.
When identity, activation, and measurement work more closely together, brands can understand not just who the consumer is, but how that person tends to engage and convert across channels. A consumer may be more likely to engage through streaming TV or digital video, then convert later online or in person. Those insights help brands build a more tailored outreach strategy by device and channel, shaping where they show up, how they sequence messages, and where they place the strongest conversion opportunity.
Remove duplication across channels and ecosystems
Look for an identity provider that supports accurate and scalable onboarding and resolution across environments, and that shows how identity graph distribution aligns to industry standards at the household and person level. In a multi-device world, that foundation also needs to support high-confidence deduplication to the person and household, especially in connected TV (CTV) and TV environments where devices are often shared and both activation and measurement depend on understanding those relationships.
Find the best path to your audience
Then make sure those insights can move into activation, supported by curation that helps brands find a more efficient path to reach those audiences, and connected measurement that can tie exposure back to outcomes.
My view
I’ve spent enough time around growth teams to know that the market rarely rewards brands for having the best data story in a conference room. It rewards the brands that can turn audience intelligence into action in market and see clearly what that action produced.
That’s why I think the next separation point is activation. The teams that stand out will be the ones that can take signal from strategy into execution without losing fidelity, then connect that execution back to outcomes quickly enough to make better decisions while it still matters.
That changes how I would evaluate a marketing operation. I would look less at how much data a brand has collected and more at whether that data can travel.
Identity still matters. The difference now is that identity alone will not create growth. Growth comes from carrying signal all the way through activation and into outcomes, with enough clarity to know what’s working and enough confidence to act on it.
About the author
Kevin Dunn
Chief Revenue Officer, Experian
Kevin Dunn joins Experian Marketing Services with more than 20 years of leadership experience across marketing and advertising technology, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of Brands and Agencies at LiveRamp. In that role, he led growth across retail, CPG, travel, hospitality, financial services, and healthcare, overseeing new business, account expansion, and channel partnerships.
Kevin is known for building cohesive, accountable teams and leading with optimism, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose. His leadership philosophy centers on empowering people, driving positive outcomes for clients and fostering a culture where teams can grow, take smart risks, and succeed together.
Latest posts
The Tapad Graph Now Offered in Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud New York, NY — August 7, 2018 — Tapad, now part of Experian, is advancing personalization for the modern marketer, announced today that its proprietary Tapad Graph is now integrated with Adobe Audience Manager, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud, helping marketers expand their view of consumers and boost results through Tapad’s probabilistic solution. Tapad has been working closely with the Adobe Audience Manager team on this integration. With the Tapad Graph integration, customers based in the U.S. and Canada can use the Tapad Device Graph to expand the reach of audiences defined and activated in Adobe Audience Manager to extend first- and third-party data and deliver personalization across paid, earned and owned channels, publisher sites, programmatic, and more. Tapad worked closely with Adobe to develop the integration, allowing marketers to enable first-party data that has been previously tied to cookies and mobile. This offering has been beta-tested by leading organizations across retail, financial services, telecom providers, and more. Tapad has repeatedly proven its ability to provide marketers with a unified view of the customer across channels and screens. With the Tapad Graph, a global identity graph that currently supports more than 100 enterprise customers and 200 integration partners, marketers can extend their reach and customize messages based on user and household-level data. Contact us today
Tapad, part of Experian, partners with Twine Data to bring portable CRM onboarding capabilities to its best-in-class cross device solution
FeaturedMarketers Can Now Harness The Tapad Graph In Concert With Twine’s Vetted, Verified TrueData™ Identity Graph. Los Angeles and New York – August 2, 2018 – Tapad, now part of Experian, is reinventing personalization for the modern marketer, today announced that it is partnering with mobile data leader Twine Data (now TrueData) to bring Twine’s hundreds of millions of deterministic mobile identity connections to The Tapad Graph. Together, the two companies will create one of the largest portable identity graph & CRM onboarding services in the U.S., through the integration of Tapad’s best in class cross-device capability and Twine’s deterministic identity graph. At the core of one-to-one marketing and true personalization is identity resolution. For marketers, the ability to accurately and safely connect customer activity across desktop/laptop, mobile, CTV, tablets, as well as CRM and offline touchpoints is ultimately what enables informed and personalized future conversations with each customer. Tapad is known for the precision, accuracy, and scale of their cross device connections, setting them up as an ideal partner for Twine’s TrueData deterministic identity graph. “We believe that by combining Tapad’s renowned cross-device connectivity and our deterministic identity graph, marketers will finally be able to seamlessly segment users based on digital and offline behaviors as well as easily distribute those audiences to both DMP and DSP environments for personalized messaging,” said Elliott Easterling, CEO of Twine Data. With this partnership, Tapad will build a client’s cross-device graph off of identities onboarded by Twine from a client’s offline CRM. The resulting identity graph can either be delivered directly to brands looking to host their own identity graph, or can be leveraged in a managed fashion for marketers looking for simple connectivity of their offline CRM audiences to their DSPs. To date, Twine & Tapad have seen full connectivity rates* for CRM segments from advertisers at between 259 percent and 322 percent at major DSPs. *Full Connectivity Rate is defined as {total unique desktop, laptop, and mobile devices active at DSP} / {unique CRM users in original audience post cleansing}. It represents the final match rate of the clean audience in CRM format to onboarded audience at a client’s DSP instance. This metric encompasses Twine’s onboarding & linkage validation and Tapad’s cross-device amplification. About TapadTapad, Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company’s signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world’s largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first-, second- and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad’s numerous awards include: Forbes’ Most Promising Companies, Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, Crain’s Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award’s “Startup Founder of the Year.” Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world’s largest mobile operators across Scandinavia and Asia. About TwineTwine is a mobile data platform that believes true, honest, accurate data is the fuel that helps our partners grow their businesses efficiently and effectively; Twine’s TrueData is used by brands, agencies, and ad tech partners across the country and across the globe. Twine’s app publisher partners generate revenue while maintaining control over their data; their marketer partners get comprehensive, high quality mobile targeting and intelligence. To learn more about Twine, visit their website. Contact us today
Centro integrates with Tapad, a part of Experian, for Cross-Device advertising performance on programmatic platform
FeaturedMarketers Using Centro’s DSP Basis Can Leverage Tapad’s Technology for Extended Cross-device Reach Chicago – May 15, 2018 – Centro, a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced that its Basis programmatic ad platform has licensed cross-device marketing technology from Tapad, a part of Experian, the company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer. Media professionals using Basis can now drive better performance by identifying a person across the different devices he or she uses, serving ads in the most optimum environment, then analyzing performance to see what ad worked best based on creative, device, location and time of day. Today’s digital media ecosystem is fragmented. People consume content on their multiple devices from multiple locations. According to digital analytics firm GlobalWebIndex, a typical consumer owns three digital devices and has seven digital ID’s active in the last 60 days. Advertising technology that treats every device as a single user would not be able to guide customers down the marketing funnel according to how users jump from one device to the next. Furthermore, they wouldn’t see when conversions occur on a device different from that in which the ad was first shown to the user. The Tapad Graph identifies the point of conversion across all screens – smartphones, tablets, home computers, and smart TVs – so that marketers can better gauge the efficiency and return on ad spend. Centro’s Basis enables advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. It is the only platform that combines all of these elements with cross-device conversion attribution and advanced reporting features in a DSP. With the Tapad Graph integrated into Basis, marketers can now identify consumers across all of their devices during any point of the consumer journey. This can help marketers determine ad spend effectiveness for optimizing campaigns in real-time or for the future. Other cross-device marketing capabilities for Basis users include: Frequency Capping: Apply frequency caps at a unique person-level rather than at a device-level to prevent saturating users with ads and showing them more impressions than desired. Audience extension: Expand the reach of a campaign by learning what other devices a single user may have, then deliver ads to single users’ other devices. Reporting insights: Learn how users interact with ads across their devices. Gain insight about how consumers respond on devices to improve targeting parameters. Conversion attribution: Record conversions on devices different from that in which the ad was displayed to learn the true effectiveness of advertising efforts. “Cross-device analytics and optimization aligns with our vision that converging the different parts of digital media to create a holistic view of campaigns will drive performance,” said Katie Risch, EVP of customer experience, Centro. “Having Tapad’s powerful capability of personalized marketing gives our advertisers high-quality data to cultivate relationships with customers, wherever they are in digital channels.” About Tapad Tapad Inc. is the marketing technology company reinventing personalization for the modern marketer through its identity-driven solutions. The company’s signature Tapad Graph connects millions of consumers across billions of devices. The world’s largest brands and most effective marketers entrust Tapad to provide an accurate, privacy-conscious and unified approach to connecting with consumers across screens. In 2018, Tapad introduced its Tapad Customer Data Platform (CDP), purpose-built to offer marketers a highly personalized and privacy-safe platform to convert first and third-party data into actionable, results-driven campaigns. Tapad is based in New York and has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. Tapad’s numerous awards include: Forbes’ Most Promising Companies, Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, Crain’s Fast 50, TMCnet Tech Culture Award and Global Startup Award’s “Startup Founder of the Year.” Tapad was acquired by the Telenor Group in 2016. Telenor Group is one of the world’s largest mobile operators. About Centro Centro is a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising organizations. Its technology platform, Basis, is the first of its kind SaaS advertising solution unifying programmatic and direct media buying, along with workflow automation, cross-channel campaign planning, universal reporting and business intelligence. It boosts media, team and business performance by enabling advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. Contact us today