• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, May 28, 2024

Reach and addressability to connect brands to consumers without cookies may seem simple, but for many firms without multiple targeting options, prompting consumers to click on an ad can become complicated.

Research from Infillion reveals increasing concern that the advertising industry has entered a “zero-click” era. Some point to the increased use of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI).

The study found consumers are three times more likely to navigate directly to the brand’s website in a different browser window or use a search engine to look up the brand rather than clicking on an ad.

Marketers agree there is not one single solution to targeting ads without cookies, so companies try to fill in the gaps with partnerships.

Infillion, a global media-buying platform that combines true[x] and MediaMath services, partnered with Experian, which provides an identity graph that allows companies to understand and connect household to users and devices, to fulfill one of those goals. And when integrations run smoothly, it makes everything much easier.

Chris Feo, SVP of sales and partnerships at Experian, said the integration is free of challenges. “This is like an assembly line,” he said. “It’s fully automated. There’s no human interaction from us. It’s really about how quickly our customer can bring the product into their system.”

Feo noted that the firm has the capability to build processes on top of the data rather than just ingesting it.

Experian decided to partner with Infillion because of the comprehensive data sets the company can access as a buy-side and sell-side platform. The company is more than just a technology or service provider, and Feo said its capabilities provide an interesting combination.

Infillion’s offerings seem to integrate well with Experian’s underlying identity graph, which includes information such as addresses and devices. It does not have generative artificial intelligence (GAI) or AI built in for privacy reasons, but Consumer View -- a predictive audience and attribute product -- does. This type of product includes household annual revenue and a list of hobbies or intent to buy a vehicle of upgrade golf clubs.

Feo expects these types of products will increase their use of GAI for ad targeting. “You’re always going to need an underlying seed dataset,” he said, adding that GAI will build out predictive look-a-like models during the next two to four years, as “the industry is just beginning.”

Infillion began as a location-based ad company. In 2020, when the company was known as Gimbal, it acquired true[x] from Disney, and within the past year acquired MediaMath, which allowed it to add a demand side platform (DMP).

Ben Smith, vice president of product for Infillion’s data products division, said brands need several types of technologies to maintain the same reach and targeting that cookies had.

The three technologies include:

• Cohort-based solutions like Google Privacy Sandbox and contextual targeting, which do not have a sense of identity.
• Household-level identity is another layer of solutions.
• Universal IDs is the third component to this stack. 

“If you’re not integrating all three types of ID, you will not be able to get the same reach and addressability,” Smith said.

Infillion has a GAI platform called Brain, which advertisers use to optimize campaigns. 

MediaMath’s proprietary AI performance model automatically allocates budgets to the best performing strategies and channels.

The company also has SDK integrations with streaming publishers, which enable it to capture survey data -- as well as an integration with mobile publishers to capture location data. The data is collected without cookies through an opt-in value exchange. From that data, predictive audiences are built.