Privacy-safe solution’s performance on par with cookie-based
Dstillery, the custom audience solutions company, announced its new programmatic advertising solution, ID-free Custom AI. This revolutionary targeting technology, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), allows advertisers to reach their best customers without user tracking.
Dstillery’s patented, privacy-by-design technology works by reaching ad impressions, not users, across all internet browsers. The technology gives agencies and brands the ability to deliver advertising performance that rivals today’s best cookie-based solutions without using IDs. ID-free Custom AI is neither a new identifier nor is it 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.
“In a future without third-party cookies, brands will have to deliver a substantial proportion of all digital advertising impressions without user identifiers,” said Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist, Dstillery. “This creates a clear need for solutions that deliver efficient targeting and scale, the two main reasons advertisers invest in digital advertising, regardless of the presence of a user identifier. ID-free Custom AI addresses this need today, allowing advertisers to identify the most valuable impressions for their brands while achieving a high ROI.”
Extensive performance testing with select media agencies and top-tier brands began in late 2020. Dstillery’s ID-free audiences are already available on several major demand-side platforms, with more to be added in the coming months. AMP Agency and its client, Stop & Shop supermarket, were among the earliest customers. Stop & Shop is one of the largest grocery retailers in the Northeast, with more than 400 locations in the region.
“The future of digital advertising is constantly evolving. As an agency, we’ve worked to stay ahead of these trends to maintain our clients’ ability to reach their target customers,” said Samantha Weiss, VP of Data Strategy & Programmatic, AMP Agency. “Dstillery’s innovation in this area provides a clear alternative to third-party cookies, and AMP was a proud early adopter. We realized results from ID-free Custom AI every bit as strong as cookie-based solutions. The campaign performance for our client, Stop & Shop, has allowed us to assure other AMP clients that privacy-friendly signals can deliver results. That’s a top priority for our clients and us, given the changes coming in the advertising industry.”
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 better prepare.
“We built ID-free as the solution to help brands continue to find their best customers and future-proof for a post-cookie web, but it’s equally relevant today as a means to reach consumers that already lack identifiers,” said Williams. “ID-free is a solution that brands should begin using now to complement their existing ID-based targeting efforts and have the best of both worlds.”
ID-free Custom AI uses the same machine learning-based predictive modeling as Dstillery’s industry-leading ID-based Custom AI but targets ad impressions instead of users. The new product opens up opportunities for the future of targeted digital advertising, with targeting capabilities to reach 100% of browsers.
The use of ID-free Custom AI has already demonstrated advertising performance on par with cookies. Further, Dstillery’s ID-free solution consistently outperforms contextual targeting across campaigns in multiple verticals:
- In a sneaker brand retail campaign, ID-free targeting outperformed contextual targeting’s cost per acquisition (CPA) by 73%.
- In a B2B logistics campaign, ID-free targeting outperformed contextual targeting’s CPA by 83% and rivaled ID-based targeting’s efficiency.
- ID-free targeting outperformed contextual targeting’s CPA by 71% in a financial services campaign and, notably, outperformed ID-based targeting’s CPA by 50%.