Jana Jakovljevic, SVP, Partnerships at Cognitiv discusses the impact of AI on modern advertising while taking us through the highlights of Cognitiv’s newest enhancement: AudienceGPT. Catch the complete Q&A:

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Hi Jana, take us through your time in martech and your role at Cognitiv?

I’ve spent more than two decades at the forefront of advertising innovation. First helping lead the adoption of programmatic across EMEA during its early emergence, launching programmatic at Spotify, to now helping marketers access AI-driven solutions to scale growth. I joined Cognitiv 8 years ago, at the time we were an early player in the deep learning space, with fewer than 10 employees. Joining a start-up is always a gamble, but I felt confident in the technology and the founding team and saw it as a rare opportunity to learn about AI.

Today as SVP of Partnerships, I focus on redefining how brands and media companies leverage deep learning AI to drive performance. In a media landscape that’s more complex than ever, that means building strategic partnerships that help publishers unlock new revenue streams while enabling brands to engage consumers in more meaningful, data-driven ways. I have developed strategic partnerships with major SSPs and DSPs to bring the industry’s most advanced AI-driven curation to media buyers.

We’d love to learn more about your new enhancement, AudienceGPT. Why should marketers pay attention to it?

AudienceGPT is a fundamental shift from reactive audience targeting to predictive, intelligence-driven marketing.

Traditionally, audience segmentation was manual, time consuming, static, and relied on outdated signals like clicks or page visits that didn’t tell you much about the actual stage of the journey a consumer was in.

AudienceGPT solves this by using Cognitiv’s deep learning advertising platform to develop synthetic consumer journey profiles that can then be found programmatically. The result is a more adaptive, predictive approach to audience strategy that aligns media delivery with true consumer intent. Audiences can be activated across web, CTV, social, and audio, meeting advertisers where they are.

Modern marketers manage different types of data and workflows today. What top best practices come to mind for those looking to optimize how they clean and use data to power better outcomes and customer journeys?

During my time at Cognitiv, I’ve evaluated probably 100 data providers across contextual, attention, measurement, and audience segments, so I’ve seen a wide range in data quality and approaches.

A few best practices really stand out. First is understanding the origin of the data, whether it’s deterministic or modeled. Deterministic data, especially in its raw form, tends to be more reliable and transparent, whereas modeled data can introduce assumptions that aren’t always clear or consistent.

Second is freshness and relevance. Marketers often overlook how frequently data is refreshed. An audience labeled as a “travel intender,” for example, is only as valuable as the recency and signal behind that classification. You have to ask: what behaviors actually qualified this user, and how recent were they?

Finally, validation is critical. At Cognitiv, we’re fortunate to test data directly by running it through our models offline to see whether it actually improves predictive accuracy. That kind of rigorous testing helps separate data that sounds good in theory from data that truly drives performance.

Ultimately, the best outcomes come from combining transparency, recency, and real-world validation, rather than relying on labels or assumptions alone.

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What’s the most exciting thing about how AI is leading to a shift in marketing processes and standards as well as a shift within marketing teams in terms of how teams are structured today?

AI is reshaping marketing in a way that feels very similar to the early days of programmatic, but at a much faster pace.

From a team perspective, the traditional silos between media, data, and analytics are starting to break down. We’re seeing hybrid roles emerge, people who understand both the strategic and technical sides of marketing, and are usually proficient in deploying and working with AI.

From a process standpoint, there’s a tendency to think about AI primarily as workflow automation. And while it can help with that, the bigger opportunity lies in real-time prediction and decisioning. That’s where the biggest performance gains will come from.

Five thoughts on the future of AI and martech?

1. Audience targeting shifts towards moments of intent: The combination of contextual signals, real-time behavior, and understanding of content will outperform audience segments. This goes beyond assigning someone to a segment, to predicting their likelihood to act in that moment based on live inputs.

2. Data quality becomes the true differentiator: The future will be built on better data—deterministic where possible, transparent in methodology, and validated against outcomes.

3. AI shifts from automation to intelligence: Today, AI in marketing is primarily focused on automating execution, not redefining strategy. The next phase will move beyond efficiency gains to deliver real intelligence—powering better decisions rather than just optimizing the manual levers we’ve relied on.

4. Personalization will scale without manual effort: AI will enable truly individualized experiences without the operational complexity that used to limit scale.

5. CTV Moves from awareness to performance: CTV is a great channel for reach and scale but we’ll increasingly see it used as a medium to drive performance. The ones who win in CTV will go beyond content targeting.

Some top martech innovations and martech innovators that you’d like to shout out to in this conversation?

Two martech innovators I want to shout out are Magnite and Index Exchange – specifically Paul Zovighian, VP, Marketplaces at Index Exchange, and Zach Pucci Global, Enterprise Sales at Magnite. Both are helping push real-time curation forward in a way that’s shifting intelligence to the sell side and accelerating innovation across the ecosystem.

Real-time curation turns live data signals into actionable inputs for AI, allowing for accurate, real-time predictions. This drives improved performance for buyers in the moment, not after the fact.

Cognitiv is a leading advanced performance partner powered by deep learning. Leveraging cutting-edge AI technology and data science since 2015 to more accurately predict consumer behavior and understand nuance, Cognitiv connects brands with their customers in more precise, relevant, impactful moments at scale. Cognitiv’s Deep Learning Advertising Platform provides marketers with unprecedented flexibility, activating as a Dynamic Deal run through the DSP of your choice, as a managed service DSP, or through its industry-first ContextGPT product. Cognitiv is on a mission to bring intelligence to advertising.

About Jana Jakovljevic

Jana, SVP of Partnerships at Cognitiv, brings two decades of experience driving innovation across the advertising industry. Before joining Cognitiv, Jana was the Global Head of Programmatic Solutions at Spotify, where she successfully launched the company’s programmatic arm and pioneered the first Private Marketplace (PMP) for audio ads. At Magnite (formerly Rubicon Project), Jana held various management positions, building out international buy-side partnerships and playing a foundational role in the company’s journey from start-up to IPO. Known for landing at companies that are at the forefront of the media landscape, Jana is now focused on leveraging AI to propel the ad industry forward. Her dedication to disruption and passion for constant improvement make her a key agent of change, unafraid to break the status quo in the name of innovation.