• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, January 4, 2016

RTBlog had an opportunity to chat with Lauren Moores, Ph.D. and VP of strategy for Dstillery, a tech and data company that offers a managed service and self-service programmatic ad buying platform.

Moores never thought too much about her degree in economics but says she uses those skills every day. “I was in this data-driven world before data science became all the rage,” she says.

Moores and her team spend their time finding unique new audiences for marketers using a combination of first-party and third-party data. “We have location data, points of interest/information data and behavior/clickstream data,” she says.

For example, quick-service restaurants looking for new prospects might want to target existing customers but have no CRM data. In that case, Dstillery uses physical location signals from QSR locations to find lookalikes. Quick-service customers who visit Chipotle may also go to White Castle, Burger King and others. “We’re looking at the long tail of signals,” Moores said. “We’re creating custom audiences.” It can also find people who have visited specific quick-service restaurants in the past and use that data.

Another route is to take cookies on the desktop and run them against Dstillery’s store of cookies across the U.S., and all the data it has. The agency examines hashtags and all types of behaviors and cookies on Web sites over the course of a week or so.

Moores is particularly interested in mobile prospecting: the ability to take a mobile signal and find the audience across other channels and the ability to prospect, looking for the  lookalikes of people with particular app behavior. In this way, you're using something other than location data.

Still, mobile prospecting is in its infancy because the data is harder to get, she says. “You need a good set of other mobile clickstreams… You need to know what apps people are using... and in order to get a full understanding of behavior, you need to know the other side: those non-ad-supported apps. That information is relevant to building a mobile prospecting model.”

Moores believes this data will become easier to get this year: “You have to aggregate data across different mobile app developers or providers who have gotten their audience to opt into selling that information. They would offer for consumers to get the app for free and receive no ads, but they would sell their data anonymously.”

Moores says this has been happening on the desktop side for years but “mobile data access needs to improve this year.”