Trust, Scale and Interoperability: Why We’re Building the Next Era of Audience Activation with Experian

The future of audience activation isn’t about creating another place for customer data to live. It’s about making the data brands already have more connected, more actionable and easier to use across the advertising ecosystem.

Following the launch of our partnership with Experian, Hugh Stevens, Managing Director EMEA at AUDIENCES, looks at why trust, scale, independence and interoperability are becoming so important and how bringing Experian’s data and identity capabilities together with AUDIENCES’ cloud-native activation infrastructure can help brands turn first-party intelligence into real marketing and business outcomes.

Trust, Scale and Interoperability: Why We’re Building the Next Era of Audience Activation with Experian

At the end of July, we announced our partnership with Experian, bringing together Experian's data and identity capabilities with AUDIENCES' independent, cloud-native activation infrastructure. It was an important milestone for us. But the announcement itself was only the beginning. As I lead the partnership and our go-to-market with Experian, what excites me most is what we can now enable for brands,  combining the scale and connectivity of one of the world's leading data companies with an activation model built for the way businesses actually manage customer data today.

Experian is entrusted with data on 1.5 billion people and 175 million active businesses worldwide. It works with around 155,000 B2B clients globally, operates in 32 countries and serves customers across more than 100. That scale matters. But it's not simply scale that makes this partnership significant. It's how closely aligned we are on where data activation needs to go next.

Independent. Interoperable. Privacy-first. Built around customer choice. And, ultimately, capable of turning data into measurable marketing and business outcomes. That's the opportunity we're now taking to market together.

Brands don't need another data platform

Brands have spent years building increasingly sophisticated first-party data capabilities. Customer data is moving into cloud environments. CRM and loyalty strategies are becoming more advanced with omni-channel customer communications being high on the agendaMarketing teams have access to richer customer intelligence than ever before. Yet activating that intelligence across advertising remains unnecessarily difficult.

Data still gets copied and moved between systems. Identity is fragmented. Activation platforms often require brands to work within their ecosystem, using their preferred partners and paying according to the volume of data they move or consume. We think that model is outdated. AUDIENCES was built on a different principle: the brand already has the infrastructure and the data.

Our technology can be deployed within a brand's own cloud environment, allowing teams to build and activate audiences while maintaining ownership and governance of their customer data. Rather than building, and ultimately paying for, another place for customer data to live, we've built the infrastructure that enables it to work harder from where it already lives.

Experian brings trust and scale. AUDIENCES brings activation infrastructure.

Experian has built one of the world's most significant data businesses, spanning over 1.5 billion consumers and 175 million businesses. Its data and technology support decisions across financial services, identity, fraud, automotive, healthcare and marketing. That position comes with an enormous responsibility around accuracy, privacy and trust. AUDIENCES comes at the challenge from another direction.

We pioneered an approach to audience activation designed around privacy and control: enabling organisations to activate first-party data from within their own cloud infrastructure rather than continually transferring customer data through the 3rd party ‘middleware’. Put those capabilities together and something interesting happens. Brands can combine their own first-party customer intelligence with Experian's identity and data capabilities, and use AUDIENCES as the independent infrastructure through which those signals can be activated across media.

Experian provides scale, data and identity. AUDIENCES makes those signals actionable.

Independence is an important part of the equation

There is another reason the partnership makes sense. Both Experian and AUDIENCES operate independently of the major media platforms. That matters in an advertising ecosystem increasingly dominated by closed environments. Neither party owns media inventory. We don't require brands to use a particular identity solution. We aren't tied to a single cloud provider. And we don't need to become the system of record for a brand's customer data.  We just want to solve the challenge of scale of 1st party data in media. We know there is value there.

We are infrastructure that connects the ecosystem rather than another ecosystem that brands have to join. That's also why interoperability is so important to us. A brand should be able to choose its cloud infrastructure, identity partners, data providers and activation destinations based on what is right for its business. Technology should connect those choices, It shouldn't restrict them.

Our partnership with Experian is a practical demonstration of what that can look like.

‍But infrastructure only matters if it produces an outcome

Privacy, governance and interoperability are important but they aren't the end result. Marketing still has to perform. We've already demonstrated what happens when brands can put first-party customer intelligence at the centre of their media strategy. Our work with Pets at Home won Gold for Best Use of Data & Audiences at the 2026 Performance Marketing Awards, recognising the retailer's use of first-party customer intelligence to improve acquisition and retention while maintaining ownership and governance of its data.

And we're seeing the same principle deliver measurable results across other organisations using AUDIENCES.

• A travel and leisure brand generated £3.4 million in incremental revenue, going live in just three weeks.
• An insurance provider achieved a 45% lower cost per quote against target.
• A retail and services brand achieved a 42% reduction in CPA alongside more than £1 million in incremental revenue.
• And a veterinary services brand reduced its cost per appointment by 74% year-on-year.

These aren't data outcomes, they're business outcomes.

From first-party data to connected signal

The advertising industry has spent a lot of time talking about first-party data but simply owning first-party data doesn't create value. The value comes from being able to understand it, connect it and turn it into a signal that can be used across media. A brand might know who its most valuable customers are. It might know who has recently purchased, who hasn't engaged for six months, who should be suppressed from acquisition activity or who has the highest propensity to buy another product. The challenge is making that intelligence addressable. This is where Experian and AUDIENCES can do something genuinely different.

Experian brings the data and identity capabilities to help brands understand and connect audiences at enormous scale. AUDIENCES provides the privacy-first infrastructure to build, govern and activate those audiences across the advertising ecosystem. That opens up opportunities across suppression, re-engagement, prospecting, audience extension, cross-sell, upsell and customer retention while allowing the brand to remain in control of its first-party data strategy.

Better infrastructure. Better marketing.

I think we're entering a new phase in audience activation. The winners won't be the companies that create another closed identity ecosystem or another place to send customer data, they'll be the businesses that make the ecosystem work together. That means trusted data. It means privacy-first activation. It means independent technology. It means interoperability between clouds, data providers, identity solutions and media destinations and ultimately, it means proving that all of that infrastructure translates into better marketing and better business performance.

Experian has spent decades building trusted data and identity capabilities at global scale. At AUDIENCES, we've built a new generation of activation infrastructure designed around how brands actually manage their customer data today and we're already proving what that approach can deliver commercially. Together, we're connecting those two worlds: turning trusted data into actionable signals, and actionable signals into business outcomes.

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