Privacy-safe solution’s performance rivals that of cookies

Dstillery, the custom audience solutions company, today 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 audiences without any user tracking.

Dstillery’s patented, privacy-by-design technology works by reaching anonymous 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.

Marketing Technology News: Everyone Is a Creative – Empowering Your Fans to Amplify and Broaden the Reach of Your Content

“In a future without third-party cookies, a substantial proportion of all digital advertising impressions will be delivered without any user identifiers,” said Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist, Dstillery. “This creates a clear need for solutions that deliver both efficient targeting and scale, the two main reasons why advertisers invest in digital advertising. 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 AMP Agency’s Samantha Weiss, VP of Data Strategy & Programmatic. “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 to us, given the changes coming in the advertising industry.”

Only about half of internet users today are identifiable — a number that will diminish as third-party cookies are retired. Distillery is making ID-free Custom AI available now to help agencies and brands be better prepared.

“We built ID-free as the solution to help brands continue to find their best customers and future-proof against the 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 can begin using now to complement their existing ID-based targeting efforts and have the best of both worlds.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Amanda Mountain, Global Vice President at SAP Digital Commerce

ID-free Custom AI is designed using the same machine learning-based predictive modeling as Dstillery’s industry-leading ID-based Custom AI, but instead of targeting on the user-level, it targets ad impressions. The new product opens up opportunities for the future of targeted digital advertising, including:

• Targeting capabilities reach 100% of internet users without user-tracking third-party cookies.

• Targeting capabilities reach 100% of browsers today.

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, with a cost per acquisition (CPA) that was, on average, 126% more efficient than contextual across campaigns in multiple verticals:

• In a pet ecommerce retail campaign, ID-free outperformed contextual CPA efficiency by 50%.

• In a B2B logistics campaign, ID-free outperformed contextual CPA efficiency by 214% and rivaled ID-based CPA efficiency.

• In a financial services campaign, ID-free outperformed contextual CPA efficiency by 113% and, notably, outperformed ID-based CPA efficiency by 42%.