The industry has been talking about cookie deprecation for years. And, despite Google backtracking on their decision to deprecate cookies, brands are now more educated on the impact of signal loss and aware that third-party cookies are just one aspect amongst an array of other signals – IP addresses, device fingerprinting, email-based identifiers, SDKs – soon to be disrupted.

Nano Interactive is just one of the partners we work with to provide ID-free intent targeting to assist advertisers in running global and local campaigns across open web environments where signal loss and regulations have reduced targeting effectiveness. They analyze intent signals to create pre-built and custom intent signals to provide the best opportunity for scale and performance.

Their segments are now available across our platform, offering buyers access to hundreds of dynamic intent segments spanning: advertiser sectors and topics; intent personas (e.g. gift-givers, parents, etc.); intent behaviors, world events: and holidays in over 100 languages.

We recently spoke with Matthew Beck, VP of Strategy & Partnerships at Nano Interactive, to discuss intent targeting and our partnership.

Q. Can you tell us a little bit about Nano Interactive?

Nano Interactive is a global leader in ID-free intent targeting. To date, we’ve run over 2,000 campaigns for brands across mobile, video, and display.

Our LIIFT™platform analyzes 4.9 billion intent signals from across the open web including metadata (device, browser, temporal), next-gen contextual signals – such as entities and sentiment, and historical performance at a placement level. This ensures every single ad is displayed in places where it’s most likely to be effective in achieving client KPIs. By targeting user intent rather than user identity, Nano ensures the highest privacy standards are upheld and that we can deliver measurable campaign success through the funnel.

Q. Why did you choose to partner with Equativ?

We partnered with Equativ because of your range of powerful curation tools, global reach, and access to premium media. Another key reason we chose to partner with you was your ability to provide advertisers with easy access to valuable audiences at scale without depending on any form of ID – a key need in today’s market.

Q. What shifts have you seen around contextual and intent targeting over the past year?

  • Beyond contextual: For brands to have a competitive advantage, they need to look beyond traditional contextual targeting (combining it with other signals from across the open web). In our case, layering on intent signals means brands can stand out by reaching a relevant user when they have expressed high intent for that brand and not just when it seems obvious – e.g. a travel brand on a travel page.
  • Combining intent with in-store retail data for ID-free measurement: In a recent campaign partnership with a leading drink brand and Circana ProScores data, we layered our “food and drink” insights with an “alcohol drinker” persona segment to optimize delivery to areas of the UK with qualified sales opportunity for the brand. The campaign saw uplifts across core brand metrics, including a 43% increase in purchase consideration for those who recalled the ad.

Q. Despite cookie deprecation being on hold, why is there still an important need to focus on ID-free intent-led targeting?

  • It’s still the right way to go: Google backtracking on their cookieless journey doesn’t change things. The wider point is key: if we’re just talking about Google/Chrome, we’re not seeing the wood for the trees. It’s just one example of the far wider, irreversible trend of signal loss, where signals beyond cookies face disruption and potentially pose a risk for brands dependent on them.
  • The data speaks for itself: Only 17% of the global web is still expected to buy into the cookieless model, so brands need to start preparing for the implications.
  • Brands care about being truly consumer-centric: From our own Nano Tipping Point research, we know that more than half (52%) of UK consumers say they would be more likely to choose a brand if it could prove it never collected for used any personal information for advertising, and this is only likely to grow.

    We have evidence that ID-free targeting through intent increases accuracy vs. cookie-based solutions; at minimum, it enhances the user’s online experience.

Combined, these regulatory, tech, and consumer sentiment pressures are shaping the future of online advertising by forcing q. advertisers to innovate, adapt, or lose out.

Q. What can you share about the technology behind your intent signals and the benefits it offers?


Making sense of a vast array of data signals
Our AI-powered intent graph enables us to make sense of the 4.9B+ intent signals we ingest daily. Nano’s Intent Graph parses, sorts, and connects these signals – live bid stream intent data, next-gen contextual information, and historical performance knowledge to offer enhanced insights relevant to advertiser KPIs.

In this way, we’re able to organize them into ready-to-use (hundreds of intent verticals, personas, and events) or custom solutions tailored to brands. Each of these is dynamically activated across the most relevant content available in real time, ensuring scalability, precision, and high-performance levels.

Human + AI
ID-free audience targeting (Intent Personas) where we combine more traditional panel-based targeting with AI insight enables more robust verification of our audience data to increase precision. By not solely relying on AI, we’re helping to strip out any bias in targeting.

Driving scale, globally, from one touchpoint
Again, we’re already doing this with our Intent Personas product enabling us to scale brand campaigns beyond current 1pd strategies. Our global reach and language-agnostic approach in 100 marketers through AI techniques, such as vectorization, allows us to identify patterns in sentences and words across all languages. We can then match like-for-like vectors, allowing us to target content in any language despite the input language at a planning stage.

Driving efficiency
Integrating generative AI techniques into the planning process enables us to refine our audience-segment-building process. By using sentences, we’re able to build out segments at a much faster rate and improve accuracy by 30%.

This will also empower advertisers to make use of any relevant prompt material, such as first-party data, customer characteristics, or simple sentences to build a relevant segment to target with greater precision.

Q. What advice would you give to marketers to help them refine their intent targeting strategies?

Be clear on your objectives and be purposeful in the way you engage your audience while keeping an open mind. People are showing what they’re interested in, so plan around it:

  • Brand interest
  • Competitor consideration
  • Non-branded product browsing

Use your first-party data, but expand upon it. Intent is a unique way to understand more about your customers. What are they interested in besides your product category? Where can you reach them effectively? How does intent around your brand concretize?

As mentioned above we’ve incorporated Generative AI capabilities into our planning phase and advertisers can use their existing knowledge with our Intent Graph to enhance their scale and accuracy.

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