• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 2, 2020

Captify is filling a massive gap in the advertising industry, and on Wednesday will announce the launch of a publisher interface within Sense, its search intent-powered insight, planning and activation platform.

Sense is built to allow data partners, media owners, and publishers to unlock and extract value from search data across their websites -- not just their websites, but across all of Captify’s partner websites.

“The biggest challenge became funneling down so much information into something simple and effective,” said Captify CEO Dominic Joseph, a professional drummer turned tech entrepreneur. “We spent two years ensuring we don’t load this down with too many nice-to-haves, but rather pick-and-choose features for publishers so they can use it effectively.”

Joseph worked as a professional drummer signed to Polydor Universal for about four years, touring with big bands. When his drumming career didn’t pan out as planned, Joseph decided to chart his own destiny in advertising technology.

He is now hooked on technology and all the possibilities that come along with it. Captify has become highly self-sufficient in the advertising world. “Google enables businesses to work around their technology,” he said. “We have a friendemy relationship with them, similar to others. We don’t need them to bring in our search data, and we no longer use their platforms to service our advertising clients.”

Advertisers and publishers using the Captify platform can view interactive data in charts that identify trends for up to 13 months in multiple countries to make comparisons.

Marketers can make first-party search data actionable, benchmark onsite search intent behaviors, and prepare their business for a cookieless future. The data also can influence the publisher’s content strategy, from the PlayStation 5 to COVID-19 vaccine distribution.

Captify’s platform offers server-to-server integrations with publishers. The Captify ID is mapped against the publisher’s ID. A range of solutions support the rest.

The company is in the process of developing cookieless solutions, with plans to release them within the next few months.

As for Captify Sense, the platform is geared toward finding and identifying unexpected insight about someone searching across the company’s network of partners.

A commuter might search for information on metro cards or traffic on a specific road. By making that type of search, Sense would tag the searcher and place them in a particular profile. The technology also lists the device in which the search occurred, as well as the region and the state, among other triggers. It also can compare the brand’s products or market, with the average audience, from keywords to domains.

Early adopters include an unnamed ecommerce marketplace.

Captify is the largest independent holder of search data outside of Google, collecting and connecting billions of search behaviors from 2.2 billion consumers globally. Its cookieless Semantic engine, the backbone of the system, makes sense of the data to build audiences for targeting and reveal actionable insights for decisions.

Two years in the making, the Sense platform enables publishers to validate audiences by revealing intent for endemic and non-endemic categories, such as finding a travel intender on an auto site or keeping up with rapid changes in consumer priorities triggered by the pandemic to ensure that advertisers reach the most relevant audiences. 

The platform is being rolled out to large media brands, publishers, vertical specialists, news, entertainment, ecommerce, price comparison and consumer review sites, as well as data partners, globally, helping them with real-world business scenarios right now. 

“We’re on a mission to become the largest independent search intent platform outside of Google,” he said. “We’re firmly on that path, but we have a long way to go. We still have more geographies to enter.”