Unlocking true intelligence: a new era of advertising measurement

Today’s complex media landscape pressures marketers to prove the value of every advertising dollar spent. Yet, traditional measurement tools often fall short – focusing on last-touch attribution, ignoring offline conversions, or lacking the extensive first-party data required. That’s why Acxiom, in partnership with The Trade Desk, has launched True Intelligence, a breakthrough solution that redefines how brands measure the real-world impact of their digital and connected TV (CTV) advertising.

The business need: from attribution to accountability

For years, marketers have struggled to answer a fundamental question: Did my advertising actually drive incremental, positive business outcomes? Most measurement solutions rely on attribution models that offer only partial visibility into the customer journey – whether rule-based, data-driven, or probabilistic, they often fall short, leaving critical touchpoints and influences unaccounted for.

True Intelligence fills this gap by offering closed-loop, person-level measurement that connects ad exposure to both online and offline conversions – without compromising privacy.

This solution is especially valuable for brands that want to:

• Understand the incremental lift of their campaigns.
• Optimize media spend across channels.
• Make smarter, data-driven decisions in real time.

What makes true intelligence different?

At the heart of True Intelligence is a powerful integration of Acxiom’s Real ID, The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform, and the open-source identity framework Unified ID 2.0 (UID2). This combination enables brands to:

• Match ad impressions to real-world outcomes using Real ID’s durable, privacy-first identity resolution.
• Activate and measure audiences through The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform, which provides access to log-level exposure data.
• Translate identities across systems using UID2, ensuring consistent measurement across the open internet.

Unlike traditional models, True Intelligence doesn’t just report on what happened – it reveals why it happened and what to do next.

Smarter insights through machine learning

True Intelligence leverages machine learning-powered audience modeling to identify and scale high-value audiences (HVAs). By analyzing exposure logs and conversion data along with INTERACT’s robust multimodal AI data segmentation and audience exploration tool, the system uncovers patterns in audience demographics, attitudes, and behavior, creative performance (including dynamic creative optimization, aka DCO), media type, frequency, as well as external factors such as weather. These insights help marketers:

• Refine targeting strategies.
• Improve creative effectiveness.
• Maximize return on ad spend (ROAS).

And because the solution is adaptable, brands can use their own first-party data or Acxiom’s data assets to build and activate audiences.

Privacy-first clean room enabled

All of this happens within privacy-conscious clean room environments, where data is matched and analyzed without exposing personally identifiable information (PII). This ensures compliance with evolving data regulations while still enabling granular, person-level insights.

In a recent pilot with a major CPG brand, Acxiom collected granular impression data from The Trade Desk and demonstrated that 85% of HVAs reached via UID2 successfully matched to Real ID across all channels and publisher identifiers in The Trade Desk’s network, enabling faster, more precise measurement and optimization.

This level of transparency and accountability is a game-changer for brands looking to elevate their media strategies and drive better personalization across their end-to-end customer journeys.

What brands can learn – and do

With True Intelligence, marketers gain access to:

• Incrementality insights: Understand which campaigns truly drove new business.
• Audience-level performance: See which segments responded best and why.
• Cross-channel visibility: Measure both digital and offline impact.
• Actionable recommendations: Optimize in-flight campaigns and inform future planning.

True Intelligence scales to meet the needs of data-savvy brands with in-house analytics or a team looking for turnkey support.

Ready to see what True Intelligence can do for your brand?

Contact us to learn how Acxiom and The Trade Desk can help you unlock smarter measurement and drive positive business outcomes.