Dstillery Drops Media Buying to Focus on Audience Data

New York-based firm Dstillery has shut down its Demand Side Platform, to focus the business entirely on selling custom cross-device audience segments, citing commoditisation in the DSP business, and disproportionate basic costs for smaller players.

Last month the firm raised $5.9m in a funding round, and said it would invest in sales and marketing activity, extend its portfolio of audience solutions, expand partnerships and enhance its team. Most of its revenue still comes from a managed DSP service - it runs clients' ad campaigns through the medium of a third party platform - but while this side is not growing, the audience segment business is growing by 20% every month, according to www.adexchanger.com, has more than 800 customers and should contribute between a quarter and a third of overall revenue this year.

The firm started making audience data available independent of its media buying only in Q4 of 2017, selling it via the Trade Desk. Since then the data business has been in increasing demand from customers wanting to use the segments without having to buy media through the company. Data business makes higher margins, but the move means the company must now license its bidstream data from a third party, before combining it with other information including identity data. The custom segments are based on 'meticulously cleansed, transparent third-party data', refreshed daily.

Dstillery has reduced staffing by 25% over two years to just under 100 today, but now says it has 25 new positions to fill. The company has been active in launching new platforms and products in the last twelve months, including Dscover Maps (DMaps), a geospatial insights tool launched last August which provides a detailed view into market composition by geography / location; VOICE, billed as 'the first real-time, need-based behavior segmentation tool for marketers', with partner firm CultureWaves last October, and in January the Audience Studio platform, to help agencies create, explore and activate custom audiences.

CEO Michael Beebe is pictured, and the firm is online at www.dstillery.com .