Experian’s innovation for a cookieless advertising ecosystem
Partner Content
Despite Google’s recent reversal of the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, brands and agencies must understand that putting the opt-in decision in users’ control will still reduce the availability of cookies.
What this means is the industry still needs to continue to adapt by innovating to support advertisers’ ability to connect effectively with their target audiences.
In December 2023, Experian UK and Ireland introduced Consumer Sync, a revolutionary digital linkage solution designed to navigate the evolving landscape, empowering brands and publishers to understand, activate and measure audience engagement seamlessly across signals, channels and devices.
Sarah Robertson, director of product management at Experian, talks to The Media Leader about how Consumer Sync is reshaping targeted advertising and audience engagement.
The Media Leader: During the launch, Experian says that Consumer Sync has coverage of over 80% of UK households with more than 500m digital IDs. How will you increase scale further?
Robertson: Consumer Sync integrates with our offline marketing data, which covers 99% of UK households. We’re extremely proud of the online-to-offline coverage — this is a key focus for Experian. Consumer Sync offers the added benefit of detailed insights and customer demographics, which are not typically provided by traditional linkage methods.
Through strategic partnerships and technological advancements, we aim to broaden our reach, ensuring our privacy-first solutions capture a much broader population. The continuous expansion of the IDs we support, like universal IDs (UIDs), will help us ensure that Consumer Sync continues to meet customer demand and evolve with industry trends.
Our commitment is to remain signal-agnostic to help marketers stay ahead of competitors with the ability to work across the ecosystem.
The Media Leader: How does Consumer Sync support advertisers to effectively and accurately target online audiences without being dependent on third-party cookies?
Robertson: Consumer Sync helps marketers activate at scale. The solution matches existing data points to related offline and online signals within the same household, including UIDs, hashed email addresses, IP addresses and third-party cookies.
These IDs can be overlaid against Experian’s offline marketing data file, ConsumerView, which provides rich demographic, socio-demographic and behavioural insights. This includes Experian’s market-leading consumer segmentation Mosaic and Spend Insights, which offer a dynamic understanding of real purchasing behaviours across brands and categories.
By utilising this overlay, users can unlock richer levels of insight and personalisation on both authenticated and unauthenticated website visitors.
The combination of Consumer Sync and consumer insights enables brands, agencies, advertisers and publishers to scale their first-party audiences and more effectively engage with their customers and prospects.
It also increases the ability to reach target audiences effectively in channels where cookies don’t operate, such as connected TV.
The Media Leader: Where else do you see this development supporting effective buy- and sell-side activities?
Robertson: In the digital advertising ecosystem, buy-side advertisers (brands and agencies) aim to purchase ad space to reach their target audience effectively, while sell-side publishers and platforms seek to maximise the value of their inventory by attracting these buyers.
Both face significant challenges: the buy side struggles with precise audience targeting and measurement without third-party cookies and the sell side finds it difficult to resolve and enrich audience identities across various channels.
Consumer Sync addresses these challenges by resolving identities and enriching them with deeper consumer insights, such as demographics, propensities, spending behaviours and mobility insights.
For brands and agencies, this means more effective marketing across different channels, better content personalisation and improved attribution and measurement of marketing activities. For publishers, it offers the ability to scale audiences, identify user traffic across authenticated and unauthenticated traffic, and provide more valuable insights to advertisers, making their inventory more appealing.
To provide an example: as third-party cookies continue to diminish, publishers will face challenges in maintaining ad revenue with large volumes of non-authenticated traffic. Our match rate is currently around 50% and continues to improve. In recent tests with a major UK broadcaster, we’ve linked up to 78% of traffic to our audience insight data.
This is fantastic news for publishers and consumers alike — more relevant and effective ads and better, more personalised content.
The Media Leader: What are the best ways to ensure marketers communicate with audiences in a ‘human’ way amid the rise of automation?
Robertson: Automation can often make marketing feel impersonal, but it doesn’t have to be that way. By leveraging deep consumer insights, marketers can create messages that resonate on a personal level.
Instead of just targeting a demographic, we can understand a person’s preferences, habits and values, allowing us to craft messages that speak directly to their needs and aspirations, making them feel seen and valued.
Consumer Sync is designed with this human touch in mind. It offers unparalleled scale, accuracy and privacy-focused solutions, enabling brands and publishers to thrive, fostering meaningful connections with their audiences and delivering personalised experiences that feel genuinely tailored to each individual.
For example, consider a young professional who is passionate about fitness. Through our insights, a brand can deliver ads about the latest workout gear, fitness classes or healthy meal plans directly to them. It’s not just about selling a product; it’s about engaging with what matters most to the consumer.
By overlaying context with those audiences, we can truly ensure that we are highly relevant for each and every consumer, for each and every connection.
In the end, it’s these meaningful connections that build loyalty and trust. By focusing on the human element and using technology as a tool to enhance this connection, marketers can create more impactful and lasting relationships with their audiences.