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.
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Hashed Email is a privacy-safe digital identifier that can further enrich and expand the functionality and utility of The Tapad Graph with access to Tapad + Experian’s universe of email data. This provides maximum coverage for targeting and measurement when combined with household and individual IDs such as Cookies, MAIDs, CTV IDs, and IP Addresses. Gain back a clearer view Recent data from DMA shows that 51% of people have held the same email address for over 10 years. Email address data by its nature is authenticated and reliable due to its longevity. When leveraging Hashed Email as an extended functionality of The Tapad Graph, we are able to link on average 5 email addresses to each individual, reaching up to 90% of households across the US. Hashed Email expands the customer view by adding new email address identifiers into The Tapad Graph that associate with traditional digital IDs and cookie-less IDs emerging in the marketplace. Reduce fragmentation; and instead of viewing the emails as multiple customers, with Hashed Email they can be viewed as one user profile. When enabled, clients who wouldn’t traditionally have access to first-party customer emails are able to associate and link privacy-safe emails to individuals and their households. Brands and retailers can use Hashed Email to extend these linkages across offline purchases associated with each email; connecting traditional digital identifiers between walled gardens, activation in programmatic media buys, and addressable TV. With the holiday season quickly approaching, access to Hashed Emails will instantly increase scale, connectivity and improve measurement when efficiency, personalization and holistic attribution are pivotal to marketing strategies. Let’s visualize how quickly the customer journey can become fragmented when email addresses that belong to the same person are not associated. Mary has 3 email addresses that she frequently uses. One for social media accounts Email ID 1, one for shopping accounts Email ID 2, and another for work Email ID 3. Mary is a brand loyalist to a top national retailer and whenever there is a new season, there is a high likelihood that she will purchase the latest seasonal decor from that store. She recently did some holiday shopping in-store where she purchased nearly the whole holiday line. Email ID 2 was used to send her a receipt. However, Mary annoyingly receives the store's ads on Facebook for holiday decor that she had already purchased. This is because the retailer has not yet identified that Email ID 1 and Email ID 2 belong to the same consumer. If the retailer were to leverage Hashed Email, they would be able to identify that both email addresses used belong to Mary. This association connects her multiple email addresses together, enables her offline purchases to sync with her online activity, and helps to determine the most accurate ROAS. Hashed Email is a cookie-free added view into consumer behavior for control over messaging and for measurement. When leveraging it’s possible to report back across all channels and devices in a universal format to know when and how conversions are taking place. Don't leave valuable data on the table Hashed Email has use cases beyond reducing wasted media impressions. Hashed Email’s full capabilities extend to campaign measurement and attribution modeling. When utilizing The Tapad Graph combined with Hashed Email, know from the first touchpoint to the last where your customers are engaging. But more importantly, know where households and the individuals inside of those households are converting across all of their digital devices, by using traditional digital IDs, cookie-less IDs, and Hashed Email to associate, measure, and correlate online and offline purchases. Imagine what your campaigns could look like this holiday season if you expanded your graph with up to 5 additional IDs per household. This impact could be a game-changer to scale this holiday season. Hashed Email is a reliable cookie-less digital identifier that expands your customer universe that connects online and offline activity while improving the customer experience and reducing wasted media spend. Enabling Hashed Email for the holiday season is not an opportunity that should be passed on. Where do you sign up, you ask? Get in touch
Identified in The 2021 Digital Advertising Trends Report published by Postclick, marketers are striving to improve and enhance their segmentation and targeting strategies in their digital ad campaigns. Carlos Lopez, SVP of Brand Planning at Digitas Health predicted that in 2021, the challenge will be to overcome the death of third-party cookies and still deliver a personalized advertising experience. It’s fair to say that his prediction will still be impacting marketers past 2021 with the delay of cookie deprecation. These goals along with the constantly changing digital landscape paint a challenging picture for even the most advanced marketers. Marketers can be prepared for the next era of digital marketing by finding the right mix of partners that offer privacy-safe, cookie-free solutions. Smart marketers will employ these solutions and compare these results with data from cookies. The Tapad + Experian Take The Tapad Graph enables brands, agencies, and ad tech platforms to identify and target individuals and households across their digital touchpoints. With this data, they can personalize messages across devices, measure and optimize throughout the customer journey, and then report back on conversions at the individual and household levels. Tapad, now part of Experian, leverages a machine learning algorithm that determines these connections at scale by using probabilistic models with authenticated, privacy-safe, real-time data. There are a myriad of cookieless IDs emerging in the marketplace, and it’s not likely going to be a one size fits all situation. In order to be prepared for the next era of digital marketing, marketers should diversify ID partners and be proactive with testing while the cookie is still around to benchmark against. With Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, we’ve been able to develop connections between traditional digital identifiers (IP Addresses, MAIDs, CTV IDs) and the new wave of cookieless IDs (UID2.0, Panorama ID, ID5 ID) that will be utilized in the future. Here’s an example of what The Tapad Graph and Switchboard looks like at the Household level with various traditional digital identifiers and cookieless IDs. Get in touch
Marketers are under more pressure than ever before to prove ROI and efficiency of marketing activities in relation to business performance. On top of that, there are new privacy regulations and uncertainty around what new technologies will have to be implemented in order to replace the granular level targeting and measurement the industry historically has used third-party cookies for. It’s clear marketers are going to need the right tech stack and partners to continue to prove their team’s efficacy. We recently partnered with Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current state of customer data-driven marketing and surveyed over 300 global marketing decision makers at the brand and agency levels. We found that marketing is facing increased demands today, insights from the study include:Consumers expect brands to deliver engaging experiences across highly fragmented journeys. Seventy-two percent of decision-makers reported that customers demand more relevant, personalized experiences at the time and place of their choosing. Marketing runs on data, but the rules governing customer data usage are changing quickly. More than 70% of study participants stated that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies, fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand. These demands paint a challenging picture. Just as marketers are poised (and tasked) with delivering greater value to their organizations and customers, the ground rules are changing and threatening their ability to deliver. Indeed, 62% of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have either a “Significant” (40%) or “Critical” (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years. Effective identity resolution can help brands prepare for data deprecation challenges Marketers face a daunting landscape, but they can leverage the data, technology, and processes that comprise identity resolution to address business objectives, combat ecosystem complexity, and future-proof customer engagement efforts. By utilizing identity resolution, marketers will be able to match and connect multiple identifiers across devices and touchpoints. This allows for a cohesive, omnichannel view that enables brands to continue to deliver personalized and contextually relevant messages throughout the customer journey and without the use of cookies. The identity graph is the underlying infrastructure that defines connections between the numerous, fluid, and disparate identifiers created during moments of consumer engagement, turning disparate signals into addressable and actionable steps. These connections enable brands to bolster their ability to gain deeper customer insights and power audience building, attribution, and connected measurement. Identity resolution encompasses a wide range of capabilities that support an equally diverse set of marketing use cases. These include the targeting, personalization, and measurement of both known and pseudonymous audiences in the offline and digital worlds, which enables marketers to improve customer data management, drive more effective personalization, and gain insights and efficiencies through measurement across touchpoints. By taking the time to vet the privacy procedures and data collection processes of identity solutions you can reduce your regulatory risk and maintain customer trust. In an open-ended survey response, a marketer shared, “We’ve found that users are willing to volunteer data when they understand what it’s being used for and are asked for clear consent.” Finding the right partners to help navigate the changes The scramble to find an alternative to third-party cookies has slowed down since Google announced they will be delaying their cookie removal until late 2023. However, this gives marketers a unique opportunity to take advantage of the additional time and feel more prepared and confident in their solutions. With the delay, marketers can now test ID solutions and compare apples to apples with data from the third-party cookie while it’s still active and addressable. Test and find a solution that works now, so there are no surprises once cookies have finally made their way out the door in 2023. At Tapad, a part of Experian, we’ve developed a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for the myriad of cookieless identifiers emerging in the market. As a new module in the Tapad Graph, Switchboard will connect traditional digital identifiers to cookieless IDs to support the entire ad ecosystem with privacy-safe future-proof identity resolution. Get in touch