Dstillery: Pioneering the New Era of Cookieless Advertising

For decades, third-party cookies have been the standard for precision targeting in digital advertising. However, thanks to increasing skepticism about consumer privacy, technology companies like Dstillery are architecting innovative solutions to prepare advertisers for the cookieless future. Firefox and Safari were the first browsers to deprecate third-party cookies, but it was Chrome's announcement to follow suit by the end of 2023 that meant fundamental industry-wide change was imminent. The looming change has left advertisers and their agencies seeking new solutions. So far, the cookieless solutions offered are largely new identifiers and contextual. But they ignore the growing need for brands to grow their first-party data and put it to work for them through machine learning. This is no small feat to achieve without effective technologies and tools in place.

This is where Dstillery steps in.

Dstillery is a data science-led custom audience company that helps brands and agencies maximize both their scale and precision. The company has recently shifted the tectonics of the digital advertising landscape by building its latest, patented, privacy-by-design behavioral targeting solution, ID-free Custom AITM. "The retirement of third-party cookies by 2023 is the culmination of a profound multi-year transition toward higher consumer privacy standards in digital advertising," explains Jay Wardle, President of Dstillery. "We're trying to usher in a new era of digital advertising that isn't contingent upon the moving tide of privacy or regulatory concerns."

Preparing the Advertising World for Change

Dstillery's ID-free Custom AI is not a solution waiting to be tested and adopted when Chrome retires third-party cookies. The company innovated ahead of the industry transition to develop a patented solution. ID-free Custom AI was built in 2018, the same year Dstillery filed patents for it. "Our clients have been leveraging this solution since the Q4 of 2019," adds Wardle.

ID-free Custom AI is powered by neural network technology that analyzes opt-in anonymous digital journeys to learn the patterns of web browsing.

From these patterns, the technology builds a custom predictive model that uses a brand's first-party data and millions of combinations of privacy-safe signals like URL, DMA, and time of day to predict the best ad impressions for that specific brand—ultimately driving better conversion. "Instead of looking at someone's behavioral profile that has been curated via cookies over the years, we're able to understand the behavioral patterns that underlie the privacy-safe signals," mentions Wardle. Because it doesn't rely on any identifier like cookies, ID-free Custom AI works seamlessly on every web browser and on any device.

Unmatched Data Science Capabilities

Over the last 13 years, Dstillery has continuously honed its data science capabilities in understanding and predicting audience behaviors to deliver an effective brand message.