Retail media networks (RMNs) are on track to capture over $128 billion in ad spend by 2028, growing nearly 25% year over year. But behind this rapid expansion, RMNs face a challenge that could slow their momentum: they lack the complete picture of their customers.
Retailers sit on a goldmine of first-party data—loyalty programs, online purchases, and in-store transactions—but their customer view is often fragmented, incomplete, or entirely anonymous. Without a strong identity foundation, RMNs struggle to:
- Scale advertiser reach beyond logged-in users
- Seamlessly match audiences across channels (CTV, programmatic, social)
- Deliver the precise targeting and measurement that advertisers demand
The reality? Data is only valuable if it’s usable. And right now, too many RMNs are leaving value on the table.
The identity challenge: If you can’t see it, you can’t monetize it
Retailers have two types of customers:
- Known customers: Logged-in or self-identified users with purchase history and identifiable attributes.
- Unknown customers: Shoppers who browse, purchase in-store, or check out as guests—leaving behind only partial or anonymous data.
Although many retailers have a loyalty program, it’s unlikely they are capturing a full view of all of their customers, especially outside of their four walls.
When retailers don’t know their customers, they can’t effectively:
- Understand what messages will resonate with what audiences
- Extend their audiences beyond their owned platforms
- Provide advertisers with the reach and addressability they demand
- Accurately measure media performance and prove ROI
But this challenge isn’t unsolvable—it’s an identity problem, and Experian is built to fix it.
The missing link: Clean, enriched, and connected data
Assuming your data is ready to activate is a costly mistake. Too often, RMN data is messy, siloed, and incomplete, making it difficult to deliver the precision and performance advertisers expect.
Experian flips the script—helping RMNs transform fragmented signals into a complete, connected picture of their audience.
Here’s how Experian helps RMNs go from fragmented to first-class
Clean and optimize
We organize messy customer data, removing duplicates and filling in gaps.
Enrich and enhance
Our insights add depth to profiles with demographics, behavior, and purchase intent signals. For example, an RMN may know a shopper recently bought a car seat—but not that they lease a luxury SUV. That auto data is critical to securing auto ad dollars, and it’s exactly the kind of insight Experian provides.
Expand and connect
Using digital identifiers like hashed emails (HEMs), mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), and connected TV (CTV) IDs, we help extend audience reach across every channel advertisers care about.
The result? A complete and addressable audience picture that RMNs can activate confidently—on-site and off.
We partnered with one of the largest RMNs in the world to overhaul its first-party shopper data ahead of industry changes. By anchoring its data to stable digital IDs, addressability skyrocketed by nearly 300%. That’s the Experian difference—turning guesswork into confidence.
Retailers who master identity will win the RMN race
In an increasingly competitive RMN landscape, identity isn’t optional—it’s everything. Advertisers demand scale, accuracy, and measurable impact. Only RMNs with a robust identity foundation will rise above the competition.
RMNs that prioritize identity resolution and data enrichment will:
- Drive more revenue by increasing the size of their addressable audience
- Keep advertisers engaged with better targeting and measurement
- Capture RMN market share by offering scale and accuracy
Ready to transform? Experian will show you how
Fixing data inside the RMN ecosystem is just the beginning. In part two, we’ll cover:
- Why RMNs should be activating their enriched first-party data across CTV, programmatic, and social.
- Why off-site expansion is the future of maximizing revenue.
- How Experian’s data and identity solutions power off-site activation.
Experian isn’t just part of the RMN conversation. We’re driving it. Let’s talk.
Connect with our team
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Healthcare and Life Sciences teams map the patient journey to spot care gaps and guide interventions. However, clinical records cover only what happens inside clinics, not the forces driving patient decisions. Enriching these records with lifestyle, socioeconomic, and consumer-behavior insights reveals the “why” behind health outcomes. That’s where non-clinical insights step in – revealing the real-world forces that shape patient results. To address these blind spots, Experian and Komodo Health have teamed to integrate de-identified insights from millions of patient journeys with Experian’s socioeconomic and lifestyle data. This enriched view lets enterprises see each journey in full, identify care disparities, and craft smarter strategies – while rigorously protecting privacy. Driving tangible outcomes and better patient care This collaboration focuses on turning insights into action. With Experian and Komodo's integrated clinical, socioeconomic, and lifestyle data, Healthcare and Life Sciences teams can move from insight to accuracy, building adherence programs, finding hard-to-reach patients, and demonstrating treatment success. They can: Layer Komodo’s de-identified patient-level medical and pharmacy insights and analytics with Experian lifestyle and socioeconomic attributes Segment patient populations by condition, treatment history, and socioeconomic status Prioritize outreach – reducing waste and focusing resources where care is needed most For instance: Neighborhood-level gaps Identify opportunities to capture untreated patients and improve clinical trial inclusion. Income-related support Flag populations most likely to benefit from cost-saving programs, ensuring communications highlight co-pay assistance or financial relief options. Inside the data stack At the core of Komodo Health's AI-enabled healthcare analytics platform is its Healthcare Map®. This innovative tool integrates de-identified patient-level medical and pharmacy claims data from the patient journeys of over 330 million unique individuals – providing insights on diagnoses, treatments, outcomes, and care patterns across the United States. Experian enhances this data by adding socioeconomic and lifestyle characteristics that influence up to 80% of health outcomes. Together, this combined data effectively addresses essential questions such as: Which neighborhoods face the highest diabetes risk? Where is therapy abandonment spiking? When should co-pay assistance messages drop? How can we accelerate HCP outreach or clinical-trial recruitment? Experian's socioeconomic and lifestyle insights: Fueling data-driven care decisions In this context, Experian provides valuable insights into socioeconomic factors and lifestyle patterns, covering everything from household composition and income ranges to psychographics and other attributes that help build a broader understanding of an individual's circumstances. Where deep patient understanding, health engagement, and real-world evidence converge As healthcare marketing, patient engagement, and real-world data converge, the Experian and Komodo collaboration is empowering Healthcare and Life Sciences teams with fast, actionable insights. Fusing de-identified patient-level clinical data with socioeconomic and lifestyle attributes helps teams engage the right patients, and fuels research from product launches to community programs. It elevates experiences while proving impact with real-world evidence. Ready to utilize these insights? Latest posts
Brand and tech leaders share insights to guide marketers forward Cannes Lions 2025 brought its usual charm, rosé, and lively discussions, but what stood out was a shift in tone: brand and tech leaders aren’t talking in theories anymore – they’re rebuilding how advertising works. From identity to outcomes, the consensus was clear: marketers need bold, structural changes to thrive. At Experian, we spoke with leaders from Ampersand, Butler/Till, Comcast Advertising, Fox, OpenX, Optable, Snowflake, VideoAmp, and Yieldmo. Their message? Foundational change, not incremental tweaks, is the way forward. Here are five moves marketers and CMOs should be making right now. 1. Make identity the foundation, not an add-on Identity must be the core of your marketing strategy, not an afterthought. Building a strong identity framework from the outset ensures that your data and tech stack work seamlessly across channels. This means investing in first-party data assets and identity resolution tools that inform every campaign and tactic. Identity isn’t just a feature; it’s the base layer of everything successful marketers do today. "There’s no AI strategy without a data and identity strategy. Marketers who want to stretch every media dollar and personalize each touchpoint need a unified, deeper view of the consumer – insight they can carry straight into downstream ad platforms.”David Wells, Snowflake Next step: Treat identity resolution as a prerequisite to every campaign, not a task to address later. Align your data management platform (DMP), customer data platform (CDP), and collaboration partners around a unified identity spine (Experian’s or your own) to ensure data flows uninterrupted from planning to reporting. 2. Curate, don't automate. Programmatic is getting personal Programmatic advertising remains relevant, but its purpose is evolving from mere automation to intelligent, data-driven curation. This shift requires moving beyond static site lists to dynamic, page-level contextual engines that determine, in real-time, which impressions to display. Today, it’s about carefully selecting and curating inventory to ensure transparency, quality, and relevance for your audience. Marketers are increasingly turning to private marketplaces (PMPs) that offer curated, brand safe inventory and clear supply paths to deliver meaningful results. Expect continued growth in curated PMPs, AI-assisted forecasting, and supply-side innovations that combine premium connected TV (CTV) inventory with deterministic data. The goal is to reach the right viewer and understand exactly how and why they got there. “What we’re talking about right now is almost like curation 2.0, which is bringing more of the capabilities that historically sat with the demand-side platform (DSP) into the hands of the supply-side platform (SSP) – that is, supply-side targeting, or what we call data-driven curation."Matt Sattel, OpenX Next step: Audit your supply chain. If you can’t clearly explain every step from bid request to delivery, explore curated deals or direct SSP partnerships that align with your quality and transparency standards. 3. Connect teams like you connect data Fragmented results often stem from fragmented teams. Persistent silos (like TV buys on one floor, digital on another, and data science somewhere else) slow down budgets and create inconsistent messaging. Forward thinking organizations are restructuring teams around unified KPIs and shared data. 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This might involve data clean rooms, secure data sharing agreements, or joint analytics initiatives – but the common thread is working together on data, not operating in isolation. “We've been encouraging marketers to tie in first-party data and to really utilize that data and to work with trusted sources and deterministic sources in order to overcome a lot of the challenges around signal loss with cookies, in particular. The other way is also clean rooms. Clean rooms really enable the opportunity to collaborate in a private, safe way, and connecting to those more deterministic sources in order to deliver the results that advertisers are looking for.”Carmela Fournier, Comcast Advertising Next step: Identify gaps in your first-party data. Then, collaborate with a provider like Experian to safely match data sets and unlock insights without exposing sensitive info. 5. Focus on outcomes, not clicks Impressions, clicks, and other output metrics have been the currency of marketing for decades. But the consensus at Cannes is that those proxies aren’t enough – business outcomes are what matter now. Marketers must shift their focus to measuring real results, such as sales lift, new customer acquisition, lifetime value, or brand impact, rather than getting bogged down in intermediate metrics. This move to outcome-based measurement changes how campaigns are planned and judged: success is defined by the value created, not just the volume delivered. Unified, identity-based analytics are finally making it possible to see who saw an ad and what they did next, across TV, CTV, and digital. That intel drives smarter budget shifts and tighter creative feedback loops. “Outcome-based measurement is table stakes in today’s media ecosystem, and Ampersand has woven it into almost everything we do. 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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