Experian and AUDIENCES today (30th July, 2026) announce a new partnership designed to help brands and agencies unlock greater value from their first-party customer data and deliver more effective marketing across the media ecosystem. 

Experian is uniquely combining its consumer insight, enrichment, and interoperable identity capabilities with AUDIENCES' cloud-native technology. By leveraging Experian's signal-agnostic identity capabilities, with 85% household connectivity across 500 million digital identifiers, brands can reach more of the right customers, improve media effectiveness, and generate stronger returns on their first-party data investments, all while delivering more relevant customer experiences. Deployed entirely inside a brand or data owner's cloud infrastructure, the AUDIENCES application then keeps data securely under the organisation's control, ensuring privacy is built into the workflow ensuring the brand remains the data controller at all times. 

Despite significant investment in collecting and understanding first-party customer data, 72% of marketers struggle to activate it effectively due to technical, operational, and privacy barriers*. As brands navigate an increasingly complex ecosystem of platforms, identifiers, and media environments, alongside evolving consumer data privacy regulations, valuable customer intelligence too often fails to reach the activation channels where it can improve campaign performance and deliver stronger marketing outcomes.  

Together, Experian and AUDIENCES are helping remove these barriers by enabling organisations to enrich customer data, connect customer intelligence to activation across channels, and create more relevant audience opportunities. The result is broader reach, improved performance, and greater transparency, governance, and control. 

Experian and AUDIENCES are initially working with a small number of brands to validate priority use cases as the collaboration is brought to market. 

Colin Grieves, managing director, Experian marketing services UK&I, said: "For years, the industry's focus has been on collecting first-party customer data. Today, the real opportunity is turning that insight into measurable marketing outcomes. Too often, however, marketing teams know who they want to reach but are constrained by the complexity of connecting customer insight to the platforms, identities and activation opportunities needed to reach those audiences. "

"Through this partnership, we're helping marketers unlock more value from the customer data they already hold, powering stronger relevance, improved marketing performance and greater confidence in how campaigns are delivered and who they are reaching." 

Rob McLaughlin, co-founder and CEO of AUDIENCES, said: "One of the biggest barriers to activating first-party data isn't a lack of insight - it's the operational complexity of connecting that data to the fragmented media ecosystem. Our collaboration with Experian solves that challenge by providing a secure, interoperable activation layer that allows brands to translate their existing customer data into privacy-first audience signals that can be deployed consistently across today's media landscape. The underlying data remains firmly under the brand's control, meaning marketers can activate across channels more efficiently while maintaining the security, transparency and compliance that modern marketing demands."

"Together, we're helping brands simplify audience activation, reduce operational friction and make first-party data work harder across search, social, programmatic, CTV, and emerging digital channels."

* Experian Media Buying in Transition Report, 2025 

Experian

Experian Marketing Services empower brands to better understand, connect and engage with their target audience through deep consumer insights. Our expertise spans demographics, research, and dynamic behaviour analysis, providing actionable insight to...

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