During the pandemic there was an overall shift to digital advertising, and an increase in demand for two channels in particular: in-app advertising and connected TV (CTV) advertising. But as marketers attempt to leverage the benefits of programmatic advertising, they are faced with a series of obstacles and challenges in using demand-side platforms (DSPs), hindering their ability to make the most of the potential of their programmatic campaigns.

Recently, Start.io sponsored an IDC Technology Spotlight titled “Modern Demand-Side Platform AI Technology Helps Overcome Targeting Challenges.” In this Spotlight, those hurdles in using DSPs were outlined and the solutions identified: artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP).

For marketers today, a key challenge in leveraging DSPs is changing privacy laws, which lead to a lack of first-party data, and difficulties in accurate audience targeting for programmatic campaigns. Another major issue for marketers is their inability to keep pace with the new and increasingly sophisticated approaches to campaign analytics.

This creates an unfortunate situation: While huge opportunities exist for audience targeting and campaign optimization, marketers are not able to access them. It is up to technology to fill the gaps, and AI and NLP offer key solutions.

In response, Start.io recently launched Maia, or Mobile AI Audiences, an industry-first audience-building platform based strictly on AI and NLP. For marketers, Maia provides an intuitive and simple-to-use solution for planning, building and activating relevant audiences for mobile ad campaigns.

Maia eliminates the need for in-depth analytics knowledge, which is one of the most difficult challenges that marketers face, and instead deploys an AI-based interface to identify and build audiences based on natural-language keyword queries. Then, marketers can activate the audiences immediately on over 20 leading DSPs with just a few clicks.

"Marketers need to adapt their targeting strategy,” said Gil Dudkiewicz, co-founder and CEO of Start.io. “Audience discovery and identification is a laborious process, resulting in lost ad spend when targeting isn't based on real-time first-party data. The lack of a holistic solution that is AI-driven and NLP-based led us to introduce Maia.”

For independent ad tech providers and DSPs, Start.io’s Maia capabilities can enhance their programmatic offering for mobile advertising with an effective alternative targeting solution, providing an important competitive edge. Maia fulfills the key criteria of a solution to accurate targeting, combined with easy, automated functionality that enables marketers who lack in-depth analytics knowledge to nevertheless target their campaigns effectively.

To read the IDC Technology Spotlight (doc #US48891422, 2022) in full, click here to download.

Start.io is a mobile marketing and audience platform. Start.io (formerly StartApp) empowers the mobile app ecosystem and simplifies mobile marketing, audience building and mobile monetization. Start.io’s direct integration with over 500,000 monthly active mobile apps provides access to unprecedented levels of global first-party data, which can be leveraged to understand and predict behaviors, identify new opportunities and fuel growth.