Insights on Lookalike Audiences from Dstillery | Jennifer Zeghibe

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Jennifer Zeghibe, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Dstillery. Jennifer joined Dstillery just over two years ago, and she has over 15 years of experience in the ad tech industry in roles at Glassdoor and Warner Bros. At Dstillery, she oversees the strategy of channel partnerships where she helps pave the road for integrations of their ID-free®® solution. Jennifer, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Jennifer Zeghibe: Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, David. David McBee: I'm excited to have you. For those who may not be familiar with Dstillery, do you mind telling us what sets it apart in the field of lookalike audience creation? Jennifer Zeghibe: Absolutely. Dstillery is the leading AI ad targeting company. We empower brands and agencies to target their best prospects for high-performing programmatic advertising campaigns. We are backed by our award-winning data science, and we've earned 21 patents for the AI technology that powers our precise scalable audiences. In addition to that, I would say that what sets us apart is that we've created the first true ID-free® behavioral targeting technology for the cookieless future. Our patented ID-free® technology is completely privacy safe, can power any of our products, and be used today to increase scale and reach in campaigns for optimal performance. Lastly, we build custom audiences, leveraging first-party data so that the model is tuned to the specific KPI to reach the addressable and non-addressable universe. David McBee: It sounds very technical and very exciting, especially the patent part. That's impressive. So what makes the lookalike audiences at Dstillery different from other companies in the market? Jennifer Zeghibe: That's a great question. Dstillery has roots as a DSP, so we understand what performance really means. This means that we made design decisions years ago for how our predictive modeling works that we're focused on driving the best performance for advertisers and agencies. A few examples of how this translates are with our ID-based models, which rely on 24-hour rescoring to ensure that only the best targets are being serviced. Our ID-free® AI-powered models recognize patterns on the internet that are similar to what a brand's intenders might be, and follow those journeys to serve impressions. Many times these decisions increase our infrastructure costs, but we believe ultimately that performance is what wins, and we've designed our solutions accordingly. Another example is our focus on working with a brand's first-party data to build models that are signaling towards predicting the exact thing a brand wants more of, which is ultimately customers. So this approach is what we have been optimizing and building for years. It's funny, AI is a buzzword. Everyone in the industry talks about it these days. What's truly funny is that we've been working with AI for years now. Our ID-free® solution was designed using generative pre-trained transformers, also known as the GPT and ChatGPT back in 2018. So it's interesting that the industry is now catching up to this buzzword. So in the event that first-party data is not accessible, we have a wealth of pre-built audiences that truly run the full spectrum of verticals like auto, finance, and healthcare, to name a few. These audiences are available to activate in real time. So all of this uses the same predictive modeling technology that I just described. Then finally, we truly take a hands-on approach with clients of all sizes. We are available to assist during the planning process and brainstorming so we make sure we are setting our partners and customers up for campaign success. David McBee: Well it sounds like you guys have been using technology, the AI... You were ahead of the curve with that. So I'm guessing today you probably have some more technological advancements that enhance your audience creation capabilities? Jennifer Zeghibe: I would say it's our patented ID-free® technology. It's a completely new approach to targeting that solves the problem of user privacy. So ID-free® is not concerned about users being authenticated or not, it's only concerned with predicting the best impression for a brand at the right time. So in other words, it's predicting the best places on the internet to deliver ads, not the best users to deliver them to. So this shift allows us to prioritize user privacy and AI-driven performance at the same time. Plus, our ID-free® product is proven to perform on par if not better than our best user-based targeting. So we started this journey in developing our ID-free® product in 2018 and it has been in market now for three plus years, so we have been able to take the approach of testing and learning. Based on our findings, we have been able to improve and iterate the product, truly setting us apart from other technologies that are just coming to market for the first time. So while others are only starting to develop what they claim to be ID-free® targeting, as I mentioned, we've been doing it and perfecting it for several years now, and have the intellectual property to support this with our patent portfolio and data science awards. Also, all of our models can be expressed in ID-free® and ID-based formats to ensure it's as easy as possible for our clients to use the same signal to reach the addressable and non-addressable portions of the internet. We've even developed a version of ID-free® that's tailored to healthcare advertisers called Custom Patient Targeting to help healthcare advertisers and agencies stay compliant with user privacy laws and regulations such as the Washington's My Health My Data law. David McBee: I think that's really important. Healthcare providers are really searching for ways to target their clients legally and safely. Jennifer Zeghibe: Exactly. David McBee: All right, so I think... We hear from a lot of lookalike companies, and everybody has different methodologies. What are the data sources and methodologies that Dstillery uses to create its audience? Jennifer Zeghibe: Sure. The way we think about our data is that there are few components. So there is universe data, which we use across all portions of our business. So for our ID-based business, this includes data from publishers, publishing utilities, and ad tech companies. Our ID-free® solution is powered using opt-in behavioral panel data, and is truly anonymous, and is a foundation that will be there regardless of what tech giants and regulators decide. Then this ultimately feeds into a proprietary data set we call Map of the Internet, or MOTI, which is a behavioral understanding of aggregate user journeys across the internet, and is the foundation of our ID-free® product. Then finally, when building a custom AI model for a brand, we will seed the model using their first-party data collected from a website, CRM list, or other formats like campaign performance data or search terms. David McBee: What trends do you foresee in the lookalike audience creation space over the next few years, and how is Dstillery preparing for that? Jennifer Zeghibe: That's a great question. I think the obvious answer here would be cookies, but we actually think about this as being a much longer journey that's a combination of defining consumer privacy like GDPR and technical identity signal loss. This is actually why we started developing ID-free® in 2018, because we could tell that over time the ability to do user-based targeting was going to be more difficult, and that's exactly what we've seen play out. We've been preparing for this moment, and building and optimizing our ID-free® technology. But there's more to just solving the cookie problem, the solution has to work. It has to be market-ready and it has to be, frankly, easy to use, and the last of times feeling like the most impactful for the industry. We now feel like we're in a position where we can help folks who have a stake in programmatic advertising ease their way through this transition rather than fall off the performance cliff because they weren't prepared, or educated, or testing out different solutions. We do however believe that ID-based targeting is extremely important and effective, and is actually here to stay, but we also foresee a point at which the consistent ROI from ID-based becomes harder to achieve because, as addressable universes shrink, the cost to buy impressions will skyrocket, and cost is obviously a huge factor in calculating the ROI. So in other words, we believe Dstillery is extremely well-suited for the long-term shift. David McBee: That's why Simpli.fi has partnered with Dstillery, because we are very impressed by this technology and we think it's got a place in the programmatic space. So tell us just a little bit about that relationship between Dstillery and Simpli.fi, and how it is good for both of our clients. Jennifer Zeghibe: Absolutely. We consider Simpli.fi one of our strategic partners, and the business development team we collaborate with has been instrumental in our shared success. I'll provide a few noteworthy highlights. Remember, this is just the beginning with our team, so there's a tremendous amount of growth potential here. Since partnering, we've made over 10,000 of our pre-built audiences available to Simpli.fi customers. Our audience selection, as I mentioned previously, is extremely diverse, spanning from automotive, to B2B, to the travel verticals, to name a few. Additionally, we've collaborated with Simpli.fi and your clients to build custom models that are precisely tailored to the campaign KPIs, including models seeded with a brand's first-party data, search terms, specific URLs of interest, or even campaign performance data. Another highlight that's worth mentioning is that we've designed custom solutions for your key initiatives, like the Olympics for example. We've created ID-free® and ID-based PMPs, models that align perfectly with those initiatives. So we've truly embraced this partnership with true team spirit, knowing that when we can help your clients achieve their goals we all share in the victory, and that means we're always ready to join client calls and go the extra mile with brainstorming solutions that make sense for them. I'd say, collectively, we've been able to, through these joint efforts, grow our businesses together. David McBee: Yeah, that's awesome. All right. Well, we are out of time, so I'm going to ask you to please share with our viewers what is the best way for them to get in touch with you. Jennifer Zeghibe: Sure. So you can find out more about our solutions and our thought leadership by visiting Dstillery's page on LinkedIn. David McBee: Okay. Thank you very much for being my guest today. Jennifer Zeghibe: David, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. As I mentioned earlier, it's truly been a delight to work with the Simpli.fi team, and we look forward to continuing to grow our partnership further. Take care. David McBee: Us too, Jennifer. Thank you guys for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, comment, a share, or a review. Be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed about new episodes. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading, media buying, and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.