The Pontiac platform offers a variety of Custom Audience options that allow you to customize your targeting and strategically place your ads to reach the right users. To create a Custom Audience, go to the ‘Audiences’ tab and select ‘New Custom Audience’. Give the Audience a name and select the type of Audience from the dropdown. Enter the Audience data according to the indicated format. These Audiences will automatically be available to associate to any Line Item or Campaign.

Custom Audiences will expire 180 days after they are created. The expiration date for each Custom Audience is visible in the ‘Audiences’ tab. An expired audience can be re-activated after the expiration date by opening the audience, checking the ‘Active’ box, then clicking ‘Save’.

IP Address Audience

An IP address audience uses a list of IPs or IP ranges to target devices

Line format:  [IP] or [Start IP],[End IP]
Example: 63.148.81.24 or 234.123.0.13,234.123.10.15

Hashed IP Address Audience

Enter the hashed IPs from log files, IP conversion pixel reports, or other custom reports downloaded from Pontiac to create an audience for targeting on bidder campaigns. Target converted IPs (IP Path to Conversion report), IPs that saw ads from previous campaigns (Log Level Report), or IPs that have visited a site where an IP pixel is placed (IP Pixel Page Visits Report). Note: these must be IPs that were hashed by Pontiac.

Line format:  [IP Hash]
Example: 225f334d5db5e4c824d49cd7b03fc73ae21d1c715573a7c1a86abb7a11a80364

IFA Audience

The IFA is a device ID sanctioned for advertiser use, these can be found in Pontiac log files from previous campaigns. Enter each IFA on a new line.

Line format: [Device IFA]
Example: 735612e1-d4b9-40ec-83da-9ea0d3c5ceb3

Zip Code Audience

A Zip Code Audience leverages the national postal code system to target a specific geographical area. This Audience has a limit of 100,000 Zips per list. Enter the Zip Code followed by a comma and the Country Code with each entry on an individual line. If the country code is not entered, it will default to US.

Line format: [Zip Code],[Country Code]
Example: 03102,US

Full URL Audience

A Full URL Audience allows for targeting site lists that contain the full URL pathway to place ads on specific articles. These can be used for OLV campaigns serving on web inventory. Enter the Full URL in the text box, will each entry on a new line. The URL should not include the scheme.

Line format: [Full URL]
Example: www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/40276938/sources-49ers-give-christian-mccaffrey-2-year-38m-extension

Contextual AI is an AI-based, custom targeting solution that performs deep content analysis to find the best contextual placements for your ads.

Contextual AI uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to digest the content of articles across the web and understand the text the way a human would. By processing entire websites of content, the AI overcomes the ambiguities in language that over-simplified tools such as keywords can overlook, accurately assigning meaning to the words in context. (For example, does the word ‘Apple’ in this article refer to a company or a fruit?). A neural network produces an embedding vector of the content, allowing full webpages to be indexed for contextual relevance:

Leveraging this rich contextual analysis, Advertisers can build custom lookalike segments from a few sample articles or select from our list of curated contextual segments for over 300 IAB content categories. These segments have an additional cost of a $0.25 CPM that will be added to the all-in cost of media.

1. Define your target content:
   • URL Input: Find 4-5 sample articles that represent your brand’s target content. The following are our recommendations for selecting your sample articles:
     • Aim for a minimum of 3-5 example pages per contextual segment. Closer to 10 may provide good results depending on the subject but won’t be necessary in all cases.
     • Choose the number of examples based on how broad or narrow you want to match. If you want to go for something really broad (for example, “current events”, an IAB category), you’ll want a number of examples covering many aspects of such a broad subject (in December of 2022 I might include examples covering inflation, the Ukraine war, midterm elections, twitter, gpt-3, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and the World Cup for example). On the other hand, if you want to get very precise, for example “1960s muscle cars” you can get away with fewer examples.
     • Look for pages that are text-heavy with at least 5 sentences. Low quality pages (e.g. infinite scroll, interactive, or image heavy pages) will have lower performance in the matching process. News articles, blog posts, how-to articles, etc will provide more accurate matches.
   • Text Input: Enter a descriptive paragraph of text about the topic of interest to build a list of contextually relevant URLs for targeting. Text should have a minimum of 50 words and maximum of 500.
2. Create the Audience: In the ‘Audiences’ tab, select ‘New Contextual Audience’ and enter your sample articles. Using NLP, the sample articles are analyzed to achieve a deep understanding of content and meaning. The algorithm compares your sample articles to millions of URLs across the web to find the closest contextual matches.
   • Once your custom segment has generated, you can review a sample of the matched articles by clicking on the name of the Audience in the ‘Audiences’ tab. Under the ‘Site List‘ section, you will see the URLs for your sample articles. These can be edited at any time if the ‘Allow Updates’ box is checked. Below this section you will see ‘Example Audience Data‘, this is a sample of the matched articles that your ads will target when you use this Audience. Note, this is only a sample and not a complete list of matched URLs. The total number of matched URLs will be displayed under ‘Valid Records’.
3. Target the Audience on a Line: Matched articles are compiled in a custom segment that can be added to your Line Item under ‘Audiences’ using the ‘Associate Segments’ button. These audience segments contain Full URLs for precise contextual targeting. It is not recommended to layer this segment with any additional inventory or audience targeting as this may restrict campaign scale.

IAB Curated Contextual Segments

In the ‘Audiences’ tab you will find over 300 Contextual AI segments curated by the Pontiac Team for each of the IAB categories. If you click on the name of the segment, you can see the input and the sample output for this segment. The ‘Site List’ section displays the articles that were used to ‘define’ the desired content for the category. The ‘Example Audience Data’ below shows a sample of the matched articles where the ads would serve if this Audience is targeted. This is a sample and not the complete list of URLs contained in the Audience.

Note, these IAB Category segments cannot be edited and they are already available for use across all of your Advertisers at a $0.25 CPM. These can be added in the ‘Associate Segments’ section of the Line Item, under ‘Contextual’.

Remarketing audiences can be built from a pixel placed on the advertiser’s website or within a creative. These pixels can be built in the Advertiser details section. Give the pixel a name and select the ‘Creative Audience’ checkbox. The ‘Days to live’ field is the expiration window for an IP in the audience and the max expiration is 180 days. For example, in the screenshot below, this remarketing audience would include visitors to the website in the last 30 days (note: users are only added to the audience if they visit the site after the pixel is placed).

The audience will automatically appear in the ‘Custom Audiences’ section of the ‘Audiences’ tab with the name and ID of the pixel as the name of the audience. This audience will populate with the IPs of users that have visited the page where the pixel is placed. When opening the audience, the list will be limited to a sample of 30,000 IPs, but the ‘Records’ field will display the total count.

The Pontiac platform is directly integrated with TransUnion to provide demographic and interest data that is compatible with any media or campaign type. The TruAudience Data Marketplace library contains over 55,000 audiences ranging from demographics to auto intenders, lifestyle groups, purchase behavior, political party affiliation and more. With the precision tuned and deterministically grounded view of identity covering people, households and devices, the TruAudience Data Marketplace delivers scale across 80 million plus US households to optimize advertising and maximize streaming media campaign performance. For more information on available audiences and assistance activating with TransUnion on your campaigns, reach out through the Help Center.

Audience fees will be applied as a CPM on the line item that is included in ‘Total Cost’. If multiple audiences are targeted or anti-targeted, the line will only include the CPM of the highest priced segment.

Custom CRM Audiences

In partnership with TransUnion, Pontiac customers can create custom data segments from their existing CRM data. Using any of the data points listed below, create a targetable audience for CTV and OLV campaigns using TransUnion’s identity graph.

• Email Addresses
• Name & Postal Address
• Phone Number

Reach out through the Help Center for more information.

The Audience Research Tool (ART) is a proprietary cookie-less identity solution designed by Pontiac Intelligence to enable Advertisers to both better understand and better reach the users of highest potential value to their brand and subsequently maximize their ad spend.

Centered around the U.S. zip code, ART reports aggregate and analyze demographic data & content consumption by zip to build audiences for all channels & media types. A privacy-compliant targeting solution that drives both performance and scale across all your digital campaigns.

Pontiac’s has a complete catalog of ART audiences that span across all demographics and interests. These audiences are readily available to assign to any Campaign or Line Item. If you do not see an existing audience for your target, use the ART suite to create fully customized audiences. Read more here: Audience Research Tool (ART)

When applicable, audience fees will be applied as a CPM on the line item that is included in ‘Total Cost’. If multiple audiences are targeted, the line will only include the CPM of the highest priced segment.

Review the full ART segment dictionary here: