• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 16, 2022

Patti Boyle is CMO at Dstillery and a member of the executive team of which 26% are women. She works alongside others such as Melinda Han Williams, chief data scientist of Dstillery. Williams has led the team in the development of  technology, research and patents.

“The biggest challenge today is addressing the cookieless future,” Boyle said -- "and addressing it in a way that’s not simply using an alternate identifier, but rather void of any identifier of consumer data.”

She also pointed to gaining trust with customers who have yet to believe cookieless targeting works.  

Boyle leads Dstillery and its clients, such as AMP Agency, through the deprecation of cookies.

The anchor of Dstillery’s business, founded in 2008, is data, built on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Its customers are advertisers, as well as agencies that serve those brands.

The technology supports about 6,500 brand advertisers, such as T-Mobile, and 750 ad agencies such as WPP Group. The company -- which has over 100 employees -- serves North America today, with expansion plans in the works.

The company will soon introduce a new type of ID-free solution for healthcare, she said. "Healthcare is an example of an industry that needs privacy safe-solutions today,” she said. “There’s no waiting for cookie deprecation or for Google to make any decisions.”

Last week, the company announced a programmatic ad-targeting technology -- ID-free Custom AI -- which allows advertisers to reach the best audiences without web-browser trackers. The goal is to identify the most valuable impressions while maintaining a high return on investment.

ID-free Custom AI is not a new identifier or contextual targeting.

It’s a new category of behavioral targeting that uses AI to predict the likelihood of conversion based on privacy-safe signals like URL, DMA and time of day.

The technology starts by analyzing the brand’s customer data. Then Dstillery looks at tens of millions of “privacy safe data signals” that are not linked to anyone’s ID.

“We do not have their devices, and we do not know who they are,” Boyle said. “We look at location, time of day, website URLs and several other inputs, using a behavioral predictive method.”

Only about half of the internet today is addressable -- a proportion that will diminish as third-party cookies are retired. Dstillery is making ID-free Custom AI available to help agencies and brands be better prepared.

One of its clients, Stop & Shop, the brick-and-mortar grocery with online ordering, recently found that the use of ID-free audiences yielded excellent results, outperforming third-party cookie-based behavioral targeting by 72% on checkout orders, and contextual targeting by 12%.