testCategory: Audiences

AI audience targeting: how Dstillery drives precision at scale

Posted on October 15, 2026 by - Audiences, Multimodal AI

AI has already changed how advertisers identify, reach, and engage their most valuable prospects. But not all AI-powered audience targeting solutions work the same way.

Traditional audience segments and platform lookalikes can limit targeting to predefined categories, existing customer characteristics, or platform-specific signals. Dstillery takes a different approach, using multimodal AI and behavioral data to predict intent, rank devices, and help advertisers reach relevant audiences across digital channels.

By combining flexible data inputs, daily audience rescoring, and scalable activation, Dstillery helps advertisers and marketers move beyond static segments toward more precise, predictive audience targeting.

Here’s what makes Dstillery different.

1. Multimodal AI for precise audience targeting

Effective audience targeting starts with understanding which signals indicate a consumer’s likelihood of taking action.

Dstillery’s custom, patented AI models learn from multiple types of data to identify patterns associated with consumer intent. Rather than relying solely on predefined audience segments or demographic categories, our multimodal AI can use diverse inputs to build audiences aligned with specific campaign objectives.

Advertisers can start with CRM data, keywords, website signals, CTV exposure, or a written campaign brief. Our models use these inputs to identify relevant behavioral patterns and rank devices by modeled intent.

Dstillery brings three key capabilities together:

  • Multimodal AI: Learn from diverse data types to uncover relevant audience signals.
  • Device-level intent ranking: Prioritize devices based on modeled likelihood of taking action.
  • Daily audience rescoring: Reassess audience relevance every 24 hours as signals evolve.

This combination creates a flexible approach to predictive audience targeting, helping advertisers identify prospects based on behavioral insights rather than relying exclusively on static segments.

2. Flexible audience building, with or without first-party data

First-party data can be a valuable starting point for digital advertising, but it isn’t always available in sufficient volume or detailed enough to define an entire target audience.

Dstillery supports audience building with or without an existing seed audience, giving advertisers greater flexibility in their targeting approach.

Campaign inputs can include:

  • CRM lists and first-party customer data
  • Keywords and search-related signals
  • Websites and behavioral data
  • CTV exposure
  • Existing campaign audiences
  • Written briefs describing campaign goals and desired audiences

When advertisers have an established audience, Dstillery can use it as a starting point. When they don’t, our AI can identify relevant prospects from other available signals. This flexibility is especially useful for reaching hard-to-define audiences that may not fit neatly into standard taxonomies. 

3. Predictive targeting that balances precision and scale

A common challenge in programmatic advertising is balancing audience precision with reach. Narrow segments can constrain scale, while broadening an audience doesn’t necessarily improve the quality of the match.

Dstillery uses AI-driven device-level ranking to help advertisers identify relevant prospects at scale.

Instead of relying exclusively on fixed segment sizes, our models evaluate devices according to their predicted relevance to a campaign. This enables advertisers to build audiences around campaign-specific goals and scale activation according to their needs.

The objective is simple: help advertisers reach more of the people most likely to matter to their business, rather than maximizing audience size alone.

4. Cross-channel audience targeting without platform silos

Consumers move between websites, mobile apps, streaming environments, and other digital touchpoints. Advertisers need audience strategies that can support this fragmented media landscape. Yet many targeting solutions are tied to individual platforms, each with its own audience definitions, identifiers, and activation capabilities.

Dstillery helps marketers take a more unified approach to audience development. Our models can support activation across available DSP and partner channels, allowing advertisers to apply a consistent targeting strategy across eligible environments.

Depending on campaign requirements and activation capabilities, Dstillery also supports both ID-based and ID-free® targeting approaches. The result is greater flexibility in how advertisers develop and activate audiences across digital media and their campaigns.

5. Fresh audiences every 24 hours

Consumer interests and purchase intent change over time. An audience identified several weeks ago may not represent the same opportunity today.

That’s why audience freshness matters.

Dstillery rescores audiences every 24 hours, continually reassessing device-level relevance based on evolving behavioral signals. Rather than treating audience selection as a one-time exercise, our approach makes predictive targeting an ongoing process.

Daily rescoring helps advertisers work with fresher audience assessments and adapt to changing signals throughout their campaigns.

For marketers focused on improving targeting precision, this is a meaningful distinction from audience solutions that update less frequently or on varying schedules.

6. The data and technology behind Dstillery’s AI

Dstillery combines insights from observed consumer behavior with the scale of the open web to power predictive audience targeting.

Our patented models learn from an opt-in panel of approximately 2 million panelists, helping identify patterns across real-world consumer journeys. We apply those learnings across more than 400 million web and mobile devices to help advertisers find relevant prospects at scale.

The foundation of our approach includes:

  • Approximately 2 million opted-in panelists provide insights into real-world consumer journeys.
  • More than 400 million web and mobile devices offer opportunities to identify and reach relevant audiences.
  • 24-hour audience rescoring to continually reassess device-level relevance.
  • 25 U.S. patents protecting proprietary methods behind Dstillery’s AI technology.

7. AI advertising technology backed by proven results and real campaign metrics

The value of predictive AI audience targeting ultimately comes down to business outcomes. Dstillery has helped countless agencies and brands across different verticals improve campaign performance, from lowering acquisition costs to increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Examples of reported campaign results include:

  • DIRECTV: 3.75x improvement in the reported performance metric and a 200% improvement in cost per subscriber.
  • Tropical Smoothie Cafe: 70% lower display CPA and 75% lower video CPA.
  • Southwest Airlines: 92% improvement in cost per booking.

These results illustrate the potential impact of more effective audience targeting when the strategy, campaign objectives, and activation approach are aligned. Actual outcomes vary by campaign.

Dstillery’s innovation has also been recognized by industry organizations, including Digiday’s Best Ad Tech Platform (2025), the Business Intelligence Group’s AI Excellence Award (2025 and 2026), and Adweek AI Power 50 (2026).

8. Flexible activation through DS-1 and managed services

AI audience targeting should fit the way media buying teams work. Dstillery offers different approaches to support you and your team’s unique needs.

Self-serve with DS-1

DS-1 is Dstillery’s agentic AI advertising platform. It helps media planning teams work through audience discovery and activation using a conversational interface, simplifying workflows that traditionally require multiple manual steps. No more juggling multiple tools or waiting days for your audiences. DS-1 is the best tool for media teams to use to collaborate, research, build, optimize, and activate audiences – all in one place.

Managed services

Advertisers can also partner with Dstillery’s team to develop and execute audience strategies tailored to their campaign objectives. Our experts help translate business goals into strategic audience solutions and support activation across available channels.

Whether teams prefer a self-serve platform or hands-on expertise, Dstillery offers flexible options to put predictive audience targeting into practice.

What to look for in an AI audience targeting solution

When evaluating AI-powered audience targeting solutions and platforms, marketers should look beyond claims of scale or automation alone. Consider whether a solution can:

  • Learn from multiple types of data, rather than relying only on predefined audience categories.
  • Use behavioral signals to prioritize audience relevance.
  • Refresh audience assessments frequently as signals change.
  • Support activation across relevant digital channels.
  • Work with first-party data while offering alternatives when seed audiences are limited.
  • Demonstrate measurable campaign outcomes.

These capabilities can help marketers distinguish between solutions that simply automate existing targeting approaches and those that use AI to fundamentally change how audiences are identified and prioritized.

A better approach to audience targeting

The future of programmatic advertising isn’t just about accessing more data. It’s about using data more intelligently to predict intent, identify relevant prospects, and support better campaign outcomes.

Dstillery combines multimodal AI, behavioral insights, daily audience rescoring, and flexible activation to help advertisers move beyond static audience segments and toward more predictive, intent-driven targeting.

See how Dstillery compares with your current audience targeting strategy. Run a head-to-head test to evaluate performance against your existing approach. Visit dstillery.com/contact to get started today.

Which audiences will drive the best results for your campaign?

Posted on September 1, 2026 by - Audiences

Given the fragmentation of the audience data industry, the sameness of adtech marketing claims, and the sea of cherry-picked case studies, answering that question has long been a pain point for buyers.  But it does not have to be.

The Trade Desk objectively scores every one of the 1+ million audience segments in its data marketplace on 2 metrics:

1 – Relevance is a measure of how closely a segment matches the brand’s converters based on observed variables.

2 – Value is relevance per penny of cost.

Using these scores, buyers can optimize performance and efficiency by building their campaigns around audiences with the highest relevance and value. And every data company can use these scores to see how it stacks up vs the overall marketplace, and optimize its segments to drive better results for advertisers.

For in-category campaigns, Dstillery’s median relevance score is in the 98th percentile across a marketplace of over 1 million segments, and in the 99.5th percentile in value.

After 15+ years of investing in predictive audience technology, Dstillery’s median audience beats nearly everyone else’s best.

How do your other data partners score? Ask them.

Pre-built vs. Custom Audiences: what is best for you?

Posted on October 2, 2024 by - Audiences

As digital marketers and advertisers know, effective audience targeting can make or break your campaigns. With the right audience, brands can spark more engagement, stretch their ad dollars, and maximize return on investment (ROI). However, as marketers strive to connect with their ideal customers, they face a crucial targeting decision: Should they rely on Pre-built audiences or invest in Custom Built audiences that cater specifically to their campaigns’ needs?

Let’s decide together. At Dstillery, we offer advanced audience targeting solutions built using patented AI technology. In this blog, we’ll walk you through the ins and outs of our Pre-built and Custom audiences, so you can decide which option will give your campaigns the edge they need. With the right insights, you’ll be ready to make smart moves that drive results and perfectly align with your unique campaign goals.

Understanding Audience Targeting

What is audience targeting and why does it matter? Audience targeting is the marketing practice of identifying and segmenting specific groups of consumers to deliver personalized messages. It’s a vital component in the success of any digital marketing campaign – getting your ads in front of the right people who are most likely to engage with your brand.

In today’s data-driven world, the ability to refine your audience based on demographics, behavior, and interests is more powerful than ever. Whether you’re using Pre-built or Custom Built solutions, when you hit the mark with your targeting, you’ll see increased conversions, stronger customer relationships, and a much smarter use of your ad dollars.

Creating a custom audience is where the magic happens. Marketers often utilize data sources like first-party data from CRM databases, website traffic, or third-party data to build audiences that target specific customer personas. The result? You get precise and effective communication with the people who matter most to your brand.

What Are Dstillery’s Pre-built Audiences?

Pre-built audiences are Dstillery’s off-the-shelf audiences, powered by behavioral, demographic, search-based, and partner data. These audiences are high-performing, ready-to-activate, and proven to drive qualified reach.

Advantages of Pre-built Audiences

Convenience: You can easily select from a variety of predefined audience categories. Click here to browse Dstillery’s library of over 15,000 Pre-built audience segments.

Speed: All Pre-built audiences are available for immediate activation, allowing you to launch campaigns quickly and seamlessly.

If you’re launching upper-funnel digital campaigns optimized for driving reach or building brand awareness, Pre-built audiences are for you. Pre-built audiences are ideal for broad brand awareness campaigns or testing new markets. On the flip side, they may not deliver the same engagement when your target market is niche or you’re looking to optimize for lower-funnel KPIs like conversions.

What Are Custom Built Audiences?

Custom Built audiences are tailored to meet the unique needs of your organization. Built primarily using first-party data, these audiences let you create highly targeted segments based on specific behaviors, preferences, and demographics.

The process of creating these custom audiences is all about leveraging data to craft an audience that closely matches your ideal customer profile. Whether you’re using custom audience targeting for healthcare, retail, or B2B campaigns, this personalized approach ensures that your ads land in front of the right people.

Advantages of Custom Built Audience

Precision Targeting: Custom audiences allow you to focus on highly specific segments, improving the relevancy of your ads.

Personalization: You can tailor your ad messaging to resonate with your audience’s needs and interests, increasing engagement.

Better Performance: With precise targeting and personalized content, custom audiences can lead to higher conversion rates and a better ROI.

However, there are some challenges. Building a custom audience takes time, resources, and access to reliable data. Additionally, if not managed carefully, custom audiences could get a bit too narrow, which means less reach and ad fatigue. 

But don’t worry – when you team up with Dstillery, your Custom Built audiences are refreshed every 24 hours, so you’ll always have fresh audiences across the flight of your entire campaign. Our experts will launch and optimize your campaigns to help you meet and exceed your KPIs.

Discover our recent success with advertising agency Sokal, where our custom audiences generated a 75% better CPM against client benchmarks. 

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing Between Pre-built and Custom Built Audiences

Choosing between Pre-built and Custom Built audiences depends largely on your business goals, resources, and the type of campaign you want to run. Here are some factors to consider when deciding which option is best for you:

Pre-built Audiences Custom Built Audiences
Campaign ObjectivesBrand awareness, upper-funnel KPIsRetargeting past customers , promoting a niche product, lower-funnel KPIs
Data AvailabilityFrst-party data is not availableFirst-party data is available
ScalabilityScalable
Refreshed every 24 hours		Scalable
Refreshed every 24 hours

For more guidance on audience selection, read about our Custom Built audiences here and our Pre-built audiences here.

Elevate Your Campaigns with Custom AI Audience Targeting

Both Pre-built and Custom Built audiences are proven highly effective in a successful advertising campaign strategy. The key is understanding which solution aligns with your campaign goals, budget, and data availability. By understanding the differences between the two audience types, you can ensure that your advertising campaigns are set up for success.

Ready to transform your audience targeting strategy? Let’s collaborate.

Oracle’s exit from the ad business is fast approaching: 5 ways Dstillery has your audience needs covered

Posted on August 14, 2024 by - Audiences

With only six weeks to go from Oracle’s end-date for its well-publicized exit from the ad business, the countdown is on. Oracle’s decision earlier this summer caught many by surprise, though many leading brands and agencies remain concerned about how to replace targeted audiences for their ad campaigns. Oracle’s targeted audience products will no longer be available beyond September 30, 2024. That said, there’s good news for any advertisers questioning the future of their audience data and media targeting partnerships. 

What Oracle’s Exit Means for You

While Oracle’s exit from the AdTech space creates a gap that many advertisers need to address swiftly, the company’s decision presents a new opportunity to re-evaluate solutions with better scale, efficiency, and reach.

At Dstillery, we want to assure our current clients that we have you covered.  And for those not already working with Dstillery, the leading AI ad targeting company, we invite you to connect with us. Our ready-to-go, off-the-shelf Pre-built audiences and just-for-your brand Custom Built audiences are seamless alternatives to Oracle Audiences and BlueKai. And for those using Oracle’s Grapeshot for contextual targeting, our privacy-safe ID-free® Pre-built taxonomy of over 1600 audiences is now available within the Trade Desk Contextual Marketplace. Through these targeting solutions, you’ll see how easily and immediately we can support your highest-priority campaigns.  

Your Trusted Partner in Audience Solutions

At Dstillery, we understand the critical role that accurate and comprehensive audience data plays in driving successful digital advertising campaigns. As our client, you can rest easy knowing that we have a robust suite of audience solutions that are ready to fill the gap left by Oracle. 

Here’s how we ensure your audience needs are met:

1. Extensive Audience Data:

Our AI-driven models are highly targeted, continually refreshed audience segments that span topics across various industries and consumer interests. Whether you’re targeting specific demographics, behaviors, or interests, our selection of audiences is extensive and precise, ensuring your ads will reach the right customers and prospects, at the right time, with your campaign messages.

2. Customizable Audience Segments:

One size does not fit all in marketing. That’s why we offer customizable audience segments tailored to your unique campaign needs. Our team works closely with you to understand your objectives and creates bespoke audience segments that maximize your campaign’s effectiveness.

3. Advanced Data Science:

Leveraging our advanced, award-winning data science capabilities, we deliver highly accurate and relevant audiences, custom curated for your industry, brand, and campaign goals. Our proprietary, multi-patented AI technology analyzes vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends, helping you target the right audience at the right time.

4. Seamless Integration:

Transitioning from Oracle to Dstillery is seamless and requires no long-term commitments. Our solutions integrate smoothly with your existing platform partners, ensuring no disruption to your operations. Our dedicated Dstillery Client Success team is on hand to support the transition and answer any questions you may have.

5. Commitment to Privacy and Compliance:

Data privacy and compliance are at the core of our solutions. We adhere to stringent data protection regulations, ensuring that your campaign audiences are of the highest quality, recency, and effectiveness, while maintaining privacy standards.

Why Choose Dstillery?

Choosing Dstillery means choosing a partner dedicated to your team’s success. Our expertise in audience targeting, combined with our continuous track record of industry innovation, makes us the ideal choice for agencies and brands looking to navigate the accelerating pace of change in the digital advertising ecosystem.

“Oracle’s decision presents a new opportunity for the advertising industry to re-evaluate targeting. Our advanced audience targeting solutions and unique targeting approach positions us as the ideal choice for agencies and brands aiming to adapt to the rapid changes in the digital advertising ecosystem,” said Michael Beebe, CEO of Dstillery.

Now is the perfect time to explore how Dstillery can elevate your audience targeting strategies. We are here to ensure your campaigns continue to reach the right audiences effectively and efficiently, achieving and often exceeding your KPIs.

With 85% of the Fortune 100 as our customers, you don’t just have to take our word for it. Our customer satisfaction ratings and success stories, plus patented technologies, are testimonies to our track record.

Get Started Today

We look forward to continuing our partnership with you and helping you confidently achieve your marketing goals. Let’s embrace the future of audience targeting together.

Contact us today to learn more about how Dstillery can support your audience targeting needs going forward. If we’re not already working together, we invite you to reach out to learn more.

Together, we can drive scale, efficiency, and campaign success to new heights.

Magic or innovation? Experience both with Audience Brief Genius

Posted on December 13, 2023 by - Audiences

Your AI-powered audience discovery companion

Dstillery’s Audience Brief Genius is not just a tool; it’s a time-saving, stress-reducing partner designed to streamline the audience selection process for your campaigns. Fueled by cutting-edge technology from OpenAI, this advanced AI tool instantly transforms your audience brief into a curated list of audience recommendations, saving you the headache of manually searching for new audiences when your campaign needed to start yesterday.

Personalized audience recommendations in a snap of a finger

We’ve all seen it before. A brand’s unique persona — detailed in a nuanced audience brief — unjustly minimized into a handful of 3rd party audiences.

For example, take this food brand’s persona: “Adventurous and thoughtful food consumers, who like to make choices good for the environment and their bodies, while also prioritizing getting the most out of life. They are willing to sacrifice a little taste for a healthier alternative. They are typically in a household without kids and have the disposable income to spend on unique food experiences.“

This might get manually translated into three audiences: ‘Foodies’, ‘Healthy eaters’, ‘Household income $150K+’. While this selection is acceptable, with the advancements in AI and LLMs, there has to be a better way.

With Dstillery incorporating OpenAI’s technology that powers ChatGPT into Audience Explorer, we finally have a way to understand and quantify the relationship between the audience persona and specific audience segments like never before.

Feels like magic

When AI just works, it feels like magic. And when you use our new LLM-based search feature in Audience Explorer, you might just feel this way, too. So how does it work?

Getting a bit into the technical details, Dstillery leverages OpenAI’s embeddings to create a method for establishing a meaningful relationship between an audience brief and Dstillery’s audience taxonomy.

First, Audience Brief Genius takes an audience brief as an input, which typically includes descriptions of interests, demographics, affinities, and other relevant information. OpenAI’s embedding technology is then employed to convert this input into high-dimensional vector representations — a fancy way to say number sequences that are easy for computers to understand.

Next, these embeddings are compared with Dstillery’s entire audience taxonomy, which has already been translated into vector representations similar to the audience brief.

By analyzing the vector similarities, we can identify the audience segments with the closest similarities to the text in the audience brief. This approach not only saves you time from manually selecting audiences, but also ensures that your campaigns are using the audiences most aligned with your audience persona ultimately leading to a highly targeted, more effective ad campaign.

Audience Explorer, powered by OpenAI, now enables advertisers to finally bridge the gap between your brand’s unique audience personas and targetable audience segments. With Dstillery’s audiences found in every major DSP, and made available as user-based segments, PMPs, and custom bidding algorithms, activating any of these audiences is just a few clicks away. 

Click here to use Audience Brief Genius.

Introducing Custom Search Lookalikes

Posted on June 7, 2023 by - Audiences, Cookieless

custom search lookalikes

Dstillery is excited to announce the debut of our newest product, Custom Search Lookalikes. Custom Search Lookalikes were born from the observation that our access to unique search and retail signals and 2M+ opt-in panel data could be combined to create a targeting solution that answers the question, “When people search for a specific phrase, where else do they visit frequently on the internet?” – making it easy for brands to identify and target that hard-to-reach consideration audience.

How Did We Build Custom Search Lookalikes?

Powered by Dstillery’s patented ID-free® technology, Custom Search Lookalikes helps advertisers reach the people searching for their brands’ keywords on the inventory most likely to drive their campaign goal. Instead of relying on searches from limited publisher sources, this solution has privacy-safe visibility into consumers’ browsing patterns, including website visits and keyword searches on top search engines and retailer platforms. ID-free® learns these patterns and extends its understanding to all impressions on the internet, scoring and ranking every ad impression on its likelihood of targeting a person searching for a brand’s keywords. The model is available to activate as a PMP or custom bidding algorithm.

Get Started With Custom Search Lookalike Solutions

If you are interested in utilizing Dstillery’s Custom Search Lookalike solutions, one of our sales team members will work with you to understand your brand’s best keywords based on what your customers are most likely to search for. From there, we’ll build our model and learn the browsing patterns of those searching those brand keywords and build your custom model. After that, activation is as simple as activating a PMP; we’ll send the Deal ID directly to your seat in your DSP. We’re excited to make this product available to everyone. This product allows us to offer something truly custom without brands having to share their first-party data that is available the moment you need it. Contact us today to get started.

Considering a consideration campaign?

Posted on May 26, 2023 by - Audiences, Trends

consideration campaign

Building your brand’s consideration campaign is a crucial step for companies trying to catch the eye of prospects throughout the sales process. Programmatic advertising is a key component of making digital impressions on your customer base that will push them toward your product or brand. The consideration phase of the sales funnel is far and wide the most difficult to optimize against. However, it isn’t impossible, nor should you feel intimidated by the prospect of creating a sharpened consideration-oriented programmatic campaign. Dstillery is here to help and break out some of the key points you should remember when building your mid-funnel campaign. 

Understanding customer intent in your consideration campaigns

The first thing to understand about the consideration phase of the sales funnel is that it’s based on customer intent. What do we mean by intent? We know that people like to take vacations. However, the idea of a vacation means different things to different people; some want to end up on a beach in Thailand or check out a national park, and others might want to take a  cruise in the Bahamas. Targeting these people based on age or gender is ineffective and outdated. Great consideration campaigns are built around why people vacation. 

With vacation top of mind, let’s say you have a campaign goal to get people to consider vacationing in Yellowstone National Park. Aside from being a beautiful national park, ask yourself, why would people want to visit Yellowstone? When we dove into understanding the Yellowstone experience and began matching it with our audience taxonomy, we built a base of eight audiences that appeal to the Yellowstone visitor. 

  • Hiking Enthusiasts
  • Camping Enthusiasts
  • Rock Climbing Enthusiasts
  • Sightseeing Travelers
  • Outdoor Enthusiasts
  • Craft Beer Enthusiasts
  • U.S. History Buffs
  • Nature and Outdoor Book Readers

Mapping out a digital journey

But there is more to it than just identifying the habits of these people in our audience taxonomy. We also have to understand their habits from a domain perspective; where do these people go on the internet, what websites interest them, and where is their digital journey most likely to take them? By working closely with our data partners and utilizing partnerships with opt-in data providers, Dstillery can weave domain data into our Consideration Solutions and help further map customers not solely based on assumed interest but also by their digital journey and online intentions. 

Intent-based marketing doesn’t manifest itself insidiously for a customer either. For example, someone looking at hiking boots may then be served an ad for Yellowstone National Park. Their adjacency to the subject of your campaign based on their internet habits is that it improves Dstillery Considerations Solutions’ effectiveness and thereby creates a microcosm based on your customers and their digital experiences and serves them ads that will ideally push them toward a real-world action. You can build this out further too – we know that people who enjoy nature also tend to enjoy craft beer and breweries. Your consideration campaign can grow in reach to include these people as well and serve them ads that usher them down your funnel. By understanding your consumer’s activities, you can continually grow your consideration campaign and optimize it based on what groups are showing interest. 

Using data to optimize

The consideration phase of the campaign is also a key point in which to hone your brand’s message and creative. In this phase, you can see in a very clear way who is engaging with your campaign message and optimize against it. You can create or re-work messages in real-time to guide your narrative. For example, you may notice that American History Buffs are starting to take an interest in Yellowstone and may begin to optimize campaign creative toward that and shift away from Craft Beer Enthusiasts.

Consideration is far and wide the most impactful portion of the sales funnel and the one where most marketers tend to optimize and re-optimize the most due to how critical it is to capture customer interest. That said, it’s important to note that its the place where your investment in programmatic campaigns goes the longest way as it connects passive interest to real conversions. 

Interested in using Dstillery audiences in your consideration campaigns? Let’s chat.

What makes the best brand awareness campaigns? 

Posted on May 19, 2023 by - Audiences, Trends

awareness campaigns

Building your brand’s awareness is a crucial step for companies trying to make their name in the marketplace. Utilizing programmatic advertising is key to building the foundation for your brand since everyone is always online. While programmatic advertising has a seemingly high barrier to entry, we’re going to break down some of the key components to building a top-of-funnel, awareness-focused marketing campaign.

Programmatic brand awareness campaigns

Programmatic marketing is the perfect entry point for awareness-focused marketing campaigns. Digital advertising offers marketers a variety of media buying options. The most common way to buy digital ads is through real-time bidding (RTB). With RTB auctions, you can access many different kinds of publishers with many types of inventory and audiences. This type of media buying is great for increasing brand awareness because you can get global exposure at a very low price.

Whether your brand is in its early stages or is a marketplace mainstay letting consumers know what you have to offer is undeniably advantageous. It’s important to generate excitement and measure your brand’s reach in the market.

Real-time optimizations

The main benefit of programmatic-based awareness marketing is that it allows your brand to tell its story in a much easier way that is optimized for both reach and cost. Storytelling through programmatic is a data-driven pursuit insofar that advertisers can test and optimize their message by seeing which ads perform best in the market in real-time. The ability to drive and optimize consumer awareness in the moment is an amazing advantage for anyone in the digital marketing space. Your customers are everywhere, and your marketing should be too. People are on their computers or cell phones nearly 9 hours a day and then come home to their smart TVs and tablets for the other 5 hours they’re awake. That’s 14 hours of the waking day where your brand’s message can be a potential customer’s next interest or purchase.

Campaigns that scale

The second and most budget-centric advantage of programmatic advertising regarding brand awareness campaigns is that it provides campaign reach at scale. What do we mean when we say “reach at scale?” Your brand’s reach is directly proportional to how much money your brand invests into the final result. With RTB auctions, you can scale and bid on ad space in real-time, allowing you to see how far your campaign investment goes in the marketplace day by day. The ability to track spend in such a manner allows you to have total control over not just your brand’s narrative but your campaign’s financial investment by being able to optimize against the last week’s or last month’s results.

Actionable analysis and learnings

The last great advantage of programmatic marketing regarding brand awareness campaigns is that when the campaign ends, it allows marketers to understand all of the people who were attracted to their product or campaign and create customer groups from these segments.

This is such a massive win for marketers because it makes the final two portions of the sales funnel – consideration and conversion, so much easier to action against in further programmatic campaigns. By understanding your consumers on a deeper, more demographic level, your brand can craft even sharper and more effective campaigns that speak less generally and more specifically to your target audiences. This information allows every dollar you put into your campaigns to be pushed toward an end result that you control to people that you understand.

Awareness campaigns are the fundamental bread and butter for brand awareness so it’s important to always ensure that you’re exacting the most value when you cast your brand’s widest net. Programmatic ad technology is always evolving to help markets reach their customers in the most effective manner possible.

Reach out and talk to us about optimizing your campaign’s digital capabilities, efficiency, and scalability today.

Google Similar Audiences going away: what it means and the best alternative

Posted on April 5, 2023 by - Audiences, Cookieless

google similar audiences going away

Google recently announced the sunsetting of its Similar Audiences feature in May 2023. While this may come as a blow to advertisers relying on this feature to connect with relevant audiences, this move is necessary to keep up with changes in consumer behavior as the privacy environment rapidly evolves. In this article, we’ll explore why Google Similar Audiences are going away and the best alternative for advertisers.

What are Google Similar Audiences?

Similar Audiences are Google’s version of lookalike audiences, which work by finding individuals who exhibit similar online behavior to those in your remarketing lists, such as website visitors, customer lists, and video viewers. The feature can be used across all campaign types, including search, display, and video campaigns.
Google Similar Audiences analyzes users’ behavior patterns in a remarketing list and creates new segments of users who exhibit similar behavior. By targeting these new segments, advertisers can expand their reach and connect with new audiences more likely to be interested in their products or services.

Why are Google Similar Audiences going away?

Google is sunsetting Similar Audiences to help advertisers keep up with changes in consumer behavior and online marketing strategies as the privacy environment rapidly evolves. With privacy concerns becoming increasingly prevalent, Google recognizes that ad practices are becoming more restricted and regulated. As a result, the company is transitioning to more powerful, tested, privacy-centric automated solutions that will help advertisers connect with relevant audiences.

What is the Best Alternative to Google Similar Audiences?

There are various alternatives marketers can leverage once Similar Audiences are no longer available. Creating different types of custom audiences is the best way to use data from multiple sources, such as:

  • Website Visitors: users who have visited your website or specific pages on your website
  • Customer Lists: users who have purchased from your business or provided their contact information
  • App Users: users who have downloaded and used your mobile app
  • Offline Data: users who have interacted with your business offline, such as in-store visitors
  • Dstillery’s Custom AI Audiences: Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences are a lookalike alternative to Similar Audiences in DV360

Dstillery’s Custom AI Audiences

Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences are the perfect lookalike alternative to Google Similar Audiences. While the desired goal of expanding reach to find potential customers is the same, the methodology is quite different. We take a much more precise approach. Our Custom AI audiences score every unique device on its similarity to the brand’s existing customers to ensure the best prospects are part of the lookalike audience. By updating the audience with new data every 24 hours, Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences are always up-to-date, relevant, and ready to drive optimal performance goals.

While the sunset of Google Similar Audiences may come as a surprise, keeping up with the ever-changing AdTech industry is necessary. The sunset also presents an opportunity for advertisers to explore new tools and strategies to help reach their target audience and achieve their business goals.By staying up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in online advertising, advertisers can continue to connect with customers and build successful campaigns.

To learn more about Dstillery’s custom audiences, contact us.

Google sunsetting Similar Audiences, now what?

Posted on March 8, 2023 by - Audiences, Cookieless

google similar audiences

Dstillery’s Custom AI to Lead Replacement Solutions

With Google sunsetting its lookalike solution, Similar Audiences, in DV360 in May 2023, it’s time for media buyers to look for an alternative that can provide similar or better performance. With Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences, media buyers can seamlessly activate first-party data to build lookalike models in DV360 and be fully prepared for this transition.

What are lookalike audiences?

Lookalike audiences are groups of people who share similar characteristics and behaviors to a brand’s existing customers or audience. Once a lookalike audience is created, it can be used for targeted advertising campaigns on various activation platforms, including Google’s Display & Video 360 (DV360). The idea behind using lookalike audiences is to expand the reach of a campaign to a larger pool of potential customers who are more likely to be interested in the company’s products or services.

Why Use Dstillery’s Custom AI Audiences?

Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences is a lookalike alternative to Similar Audiences in DV360. While the desired goal of expanding reach to find potential customers is the same, the methodology is very different. Traditional lookalike solutions look at overlap against the original seed data to find and target additional audience segments with the highest overlap.Taking a much more precise approach, Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences score and rank every single unique device on its similarity to the brand’s existing customers daily to ensure the best prospects are part of the lookalike audience. By continuously updating the audience on new data every 24 hours, Custom AI audiences are always up-to-date, relevant, and ready to drive optimal performance goals.

How to get started with Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences?

Media buyers who want to start using Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences in DV360 can follow these simple steps:

  • Reach out to your Dstillery sales representative. Don’t have one? Email us at contact@dstillery.com
  • Define and send the first-party data you want to use to build lookalike models
  • Dstillery will generate the Custom AI audience and syndicate it to your seat in DV360
  • Begin targeting the audience in DV360

With Google sunsetting Similar Audiences in DV360, media buyers must find an alternative that can provide similar or better results. Dstillery’s Custom AI audiences offer a flexible and powerful alternative to help media buyers reach their target audience more effectively, improve campaign performance, and be fully prepared for this transition. Contact us today to get started.