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  • January 13, 2025
  • By Allison Omealia Head of Customer Success - Supply and Demand Partnerships, Experian
  • Blog

How the Buy-Side is Approaching Data and Identity Challenges

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Navigating today’s fragmented, privacy-conscious media landscape is a bit like stepping into a dense jungle. The buy-side—marketers, agencies, and demand-side platforms (DSPs)—must find their way through signal loss, measurement challenges, and evolving consumer expectations. But this isn’t just a challenge; it’s a strategic opportunity. Let’s dive into how buy-side players can use data and identity solutions to be their guide through the jungle and emerge as winners.  

Marketers: Maintaining personalization and measurement across channels 

Marketers are navigating an increasingly fragmented media jungle, where the deprecation of signals like cookies, Apple’s IDFA, and potentially IP addresses makes finding and understanding audiences feel like guesswork. To chart a clear path, marketers need a reliable compass—and identity resolution provides exactly that. 

A strong identity provider, grounded in offline data like names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails, acts as a guide through the chaos. By connecting offline signals with digital identifiers in a privacy-first manner, marketers can uncover the relationships between households and devices, then enrich those profiles with valuable marketing data. 

With a complete view of your customers, you gain deeper insights and can seamlessly reach the right audience across channels—even as signals evolve. It’s a marketer’s North Star—constant, dependable, and always pointing you in the right direction. 

Agencies: Strategic partners in a fragmented world 

Agencies are the architects of the identity jungle, building bridges that guide brands through fragmentation and deliver campaign success. Thriving in this terrain requires data solutions that create actionable insights, enable personalization, and drive measurable outcomes. 

To meet marketers’ demands, many agencies have invested heavily—acquiring data companies or forging strategic partnerships to strengthen their foundations in data and identity solutions. These investments help them connect fragmented audience data and unlock new opportunities for their clients. 

But even with in-house capabilities, agencies often need more—more attributes, more integrations, and greater connectivity. In the jungle of identity, success isn’t just about building better data assets; it’s about ensuring those assets can be utilized across platforms.  

DSPs: Navigating signal loss with a multi-ID strategy 

For DSPs, navigating the identity jungle means forging a path through the winding trails of cookieless strategies. With third-party cookies fading and no single identity solution—like Unified ID 2.0 (UID2)—able to cover all media engagement, DSPs must adapt to a multi-ID world. The challenge is twofold: finding flexible solutions to manage a multitude of identifiers while staying compliant with a growing number of state-level privacy laws. It’s not just a technical problem; it’s a call for strategic vision. And the way to thrive in this ever-changing terrain is to invest in identity solutions that connect digital and offline identifiers to a single customer profile.  

Turning identity challenges into a strategic advantage 

The identity jungle is a thriving ecosystem for those with the right guide. Experian helps marketers, agencies, and DSPs chart the course by unifying multiple identifiers into a single, complete customer profile. With the right tools (and a good map), buy-side stakeholders can learn more about their customer, reach audiences across channels, and deliver personalized marketing.  

[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Experian Marketing Services. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]

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