Experian retires the Audigent brand, folding it into Experian Marketing Services

A spokesperson framed it as consolidation, not retreat in an emailed response. It read: “Audigent’s curation capabilities remain an important part of our platform and are a critical component of our broader technology and growth strategy. We continue to invest in Audigent’s technology, talent and innovation. Our vision for acquiring Audigent was to power the future of agentic marketing by embedding intelligence into every supply-side decision. That vision has not changed.”

What that means in practice, especially for staff, is unclear. Audigent declined to say whether the change would lead to layoffs.

It’s hard not to read the move as somewhat symbolic. Curation — the trend the Audigent brand became synonymous — has evolved into something far more nuanced than it was when the deal was done at the end of 2024. Back then, curation was more straightforward. Specialists like Audigent sat between DSPs and SSPs, packaging audience, contextual and supply-path signals into deal IDs that made overlooked inventory sellable. That legibility is gone. Curation is no longer a category with an agreed definition, it’s a label everyone in the supply chain has claimed and bent to their own purpose.

SSPs sell it as something they power, not something they do directly. DSPs pitch it as proof they don’t need the sell-side doing their targeting for them. Identity and data companies, Experian included, frame it as a component of a broader graph rather than a discrete product. Holdcos, meanwhile, folded it into supply-path optimization. Ask five companies what curation means now and the answer depends entirely on what each of them has to sell.

“The closest parallel may be what happened with DMPs and identity,” said Marc Fanelli, svp of global digital audiences and operations & chief operating officer at Eyeota. “Those categories didn’t disappear because they stopped being valuable. They disappeared because their capabilities became embedded throughout the ecosystem. Curation may be following the same path. The Audigent brand going away is less a statement about curation’s decline and more a sign that curation is no longer a standalone category. It’s becoming infrastructure.”