Specific Media Unveils Direct Match for Direct Ad Targeting

Specific Media today launched its Direct Match platform, a people-based approach to digital advertising that lets marketers connect to discrete individuals across their Internet-connected devices.

Leveraging Specific Media's people-based platform and a group of data partners, including Nielsen Catalina and Experian, Direct Match targets consumers based on actual offline activity. This category-focused approach includes CPG, durable goods, auto, retail, and financial services, as well as TV targeting.

"We have driven tremendous success for our clients by leveraging offline-to-online data since we launched our first partnership in this space back in 2011," said Jon Schulz, chief marketing officer at Viant, Specific Media's parent company, in a statement. "By shifting to a people-based approach, not relying on cookies and modeling, advertisers can more consistently and accurately track a consumer's path-to-purchase across all their connected devices. Adopting this methodology will allow advertisers to drastically cut inefficiencies and waste, grow and enrich their access to data, and ultimately increase their ROI through a more unified digital marketing strategy."

Direct Match uses one-to-one deterministic targeting as opposed to a probabilistic modeling approach. With Direct Match, advertisers can target their customers directly without making inferences or targeting people who are likely to make purchases.

"Direct Match represents the natural evolution of modern ad targeting and comes at an important time for the industry, as it's becoming exponentially more challenging for advertisers to connect with the appropriate audience," said& Mike Nazzaro, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, in a statement. "We are delighted to be able to extend our partnership with Specific Media to enable this new capability and believe that advertisers will realize immense value from this methodology."

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