• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 18, 2024

Reset Digital, an innovative ad tech firm that has pioneered a promising method for targeting digital media audiences not on people's identities, but on how they likely feel or what their emotional states are, has struck a deal to make it more widely available in the programmatic media-buying marketplace.

Reset's proprietary method, dubbed "neuro-programmatic," utilizes sophisticated cognitive psychology principles to align an advertisers campaigns based on what people are likely to be feeling when they are engaged with content on a digital screen.

While Reset -- which operates both a demand-side DSP and a sell-side SSP -- has been gaining traction with marketers and publishers, it will dramatically expand access to both via partnership being announced today with Collective Audience, a relatively new, but well-capitalized, publicly-traded platform focused on aggregating and developing best-in-class audience data designed for the next-generation of a privacy-compliant programmatic advertising marketplace.

In the case of Reset's technology, it's 100% contextual and not reliant on any personal data identifiers, though it can be used that way to understand so-called first-party data that consumers have given their consent to advertisers or publishers to use.

Mainly, it's about aligning people's feelings and emotional states with the media they are consuming and the advertising that appears within it.

"Marketers spend millions of dollars refining their audience segments," explains Reset Founder Charles Cantu, adding, "The problem is, they end up buying women 25-54 or men 18-49 and lose the essence of the human they were trying to reach in the first place."

Cantu built Reset on a foundation of transparency and efficiency, enabling brands to view their digital campaign performance down to log file granularity, and always in a privacy-compliant way. In recent years, Cantu, who is Black, has leaned into diverse audience compliance, and has made Reset one of the better known Black-owned diverse audience market makers, but ultimately he says the plan is to align advertisers and publishers with the culture of the audiences they are looking to reach and serve, whether it is ethnic, gender or some other cultural attribute that can be segmented based on people's feelings or emotional states.

"A Black guy who is interested in rom-coms is very different than a Black guy who is interested in crime/drama," he explains, adding that emotions-based segmentation works regardless because it is 100% aligned with an individual's feelings about who they are and what they expect to see when they show up in front of digital content.

"It's a multiplier for diversity, because we enable marketers to speak to people the way they want to be spoken to," says Cantu, adding, "That's our mission and mantra."

The deal with Collective Audience is the first time Reset has partnered with another ad tech player, and Cantu says the deal should work for both sides, giving Reset access to more pipes and publishers, while giving Collective Audience an innovative methodology for identifying and segmenting audience inventory.

"The future of programmatic advertising is all about the data," he says, concluding, "There is no good AI without good data."