Media buyers face increasing challenges in targeting and engaging multicultural audiences. New consumer privacy-related state regulations make data collection more difficult, and ethnic targeting has been eliminated from Meta and other platforms. Michelle Savoy, Chief Revenue Officer at Numatec, tells Portada that Numatec-owned PrismaIQ provides solutions to these challenges.
PrismaIQ, previously known as HEX, is a minority-owned media and audience platform dedicated to helping brands effectively engage multicultural audiences across digital, social, and streaming. Asked why this is a good moment to launch PrismaIQ, Michelle Savoy stresses the “importance of ensuring the industry has good data capabilities and superior access to media supply for multicultural audiences. Last year, ethnic targeting was eliminated from Meta and other platforms for privacy reasons. This burdens the agencies as they need another solution to reach these growth audiences.” Savoy adds that lots of digital media buying is going in the programmatic direction, and it is also necessary to offer options for direct buying. That’s where PrismaIQ comes in.
“It’s important to ensure the industry has good data capability.”
PrismaIQ: Potential for Enormous Inventory Increase
A challenge for efficient media buying targeting diverse audiences is that brand safety verification agencies use criteria that are often not valid for multicultural audiences. For instance, they use keyword blockers that are correct for the general market but not for multicultural audiences. Different studies have shown that standard programmatic platforms are ruling out 70% of multicultural audience-targeted inventory because the inventory is constantly flagged as not brand safe. As cultural and linguistic issues play an essential role, content that may not be brand safe for a general market audience is perfectly suitable for diverse audiences (see example in the image on the right). According to Savoy, PrismaIQ’s proprietary audience technology, built on AI, solves this central issue: “PrismaIQ has access to the full bidstream. This means we can see traffic flow across the ad-funded open web, comprising more than 5 billion touchpoints. We also have APIs that inform and enrich the bidstream data with additional digital behavior information,” says Savoy. “Our platform analyzes bid stream data from 95% of the available digital ad inventory and search and other data to help inform appropriate consumer profiles and segmentation for each campaign. The platform also leverages past and current multicultural campaign data to help support and validate the consumer models it suggests.”, Savoy claims. This enables PrismaIQ to build incredibly in-depth behaviour maps for unlimited client verticals and, potentially, allows PrismaIQ to increase the total multicultural targeted audience inventory threefold.
Different studies have shown that standard programmatic platforms rule out 70% of multicultural audiences targeted inventory. PrismaIQ intends to substantially increase multicultural inventory by using a new propietary technology.
Leveraging LLMs
Prisma IQ’s platform leverages Language Learning Models (LLMs) to interpret contextual content with specific audiences in mind, for instance, African Americans, Hispanics, Pacific Islander Americans, etc. The technology has been built to accommodate appropriate terms for each audience, like slang words or Spanglish, that are, in fact, brand safe but would be blocked by most platforms. “The truth is that most programmatic platforms rule out 70% of content consumed and created for multicultural audiences because the platforms do not have the intelligence to know what terms are acceptable for diverse audiences. Brands that do not work with a platform designed to comb through this contextual data with a diverse audience lens and sensitivity to these consumers are missing out on many ad opportunities simply because their platforms are not smart enough,” Savoy asserts.
“Brands that do not work with a platform designed to comb through this contextual data with a diverse audience lens and sensitivity to these consumers are missing out on many ad opportunities simply because their platforms are not smart enough.”
PrismaIQ: Technology Optimized by Humans
While PrismaIQ is an AI-driven platform, it does employ humans as data analysts to gather information and check whether the context is appropriate. This happens before the campaign is executed. “While we heavily leverage AI in the platform, that intelligence is only valid when engineers and media planners are in tune with the multicultural market. Our data and campaigns are built and managed by members of diverse communities and professionals with years of multicultural marketing experience. They can assist in setting up parameters and validating output and keyword data, etc.,” Savoy concludes. Another feature of PrismaIQ is that “unlike traditional DSPs, it bids at the URL level, not the domain level. “We only target specific pages for brand safety reasons,” Savoy concludes.
Related article: PrismaIQ Tech-Stack: How it Solves Unique Challenges
