Captify Unveils Self-Service Platform, Sense, Giving Advertisers Direct Access to Deeper, More Robust Consumer Understanding Through Fresh, Search-Powered Insights and Audiences

Captify, the global leader in Search Intelligence, today announced the launch of its proprietary search-powered self-service insights, audience planning and activation platform – Sense – which is in part developed in partnership with UM, the global media agency network of IPG Mediabrands. Captify’s underlying cookieless Search Intelligence technology is powered by the company’s vast ecosystem of onsite search data and fresh audiences, built from first-party relationships with global publishers. Sense is designed to place Captify’s Search Intelligence at the fingertips of communications strategists, planners, buyers and traders, giving them access to real-time levers to power audience planning and insights and instant activation. 

Today’s launch follows a partnership between Captify and UM, where UM has had access to the audience planning feature of the platform, using one of three parts – planning, activation and measurement. Through Sense planning, UM is able to explore real-time search-powered insights on brands and audiences, which has been critical throughout the pandemic as right now brands’ key audiences are moving targets. Advertisers can use the platform’s dynamic suite of insights to see how audiences are expanding and contracting in real-time, enabling the creation of custom audiences at scale based on connected consumer intent and interests, key moments and market and competitor trends. UM oversees strategy for the world’s biggest brands, such as Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Levi Strauss & Co and American Express. Sense is now available to and being utilized by brands and agencies globally. 

As the largest independent holder of search data outside of Google, Captify uses its Search Intelligence Technology to connect real-time searches from more than two billion consumers. Through Sense, advertisers can directly access Captify’s Search Intelligence to uncover rich, unique insights on brands, competitors, audiences, moments and markets. The Sense platform’s key features are:

• Differentiated and dynamic search data at scale from intent-rich sites for high-performing campaigns:  Captify’s real-time onsite search data is a live reflection of consumer intent, harnessing the vast world of explicit search that exists across the open web to build audiences on the fly that can be acted upon instantly.
• Exploration & discovery of insights and audiences to make the most strategic decisions: Armed with real-time intelligence, the Sense platform helps marketers to dispel or confirm hypotheses, inspiring content and creative ideas and ultimately driving new revenue opportunities.
• Trending topics and trending audiences to unlock incremental growth: With a live pulse on current trends and how they are changing by day, by week, by month and by year, the Sense platform can identify emerging and hidden audiences to open up reach and scale. 
• Intent-driven audiences activated programmatically in one intuitive platform: The ability to build custom audiences based on unique objectives throughout the funnel for seamless omnichannel programmatic activation through any DSP at the push of a button, including CTV, video and display. 
• Features developed with UM: Captify developed a feature, Consumer Journey, for UM, which reveals the pathway of consumer signals from consideration to intent in real-time.

The pandemic has spotlighted the greater need for brands and agencies to access and explore fresh and recent data, calling attention to the redundant, out-of-date data that is too often relied upon. CMOs have burning questions on their minds right now, ‘Are my audiences the same post-pandemic?,’ ‘How long do consumers now research before buying a new car?’, ‘When will consumer intent for travel return?’ – questions Sense is uniquely primed to explore. In addition to Captify’s ten years of natural language processing and advanced semantic technology, Sense is a culmination of three years of product and engineering investment, released to market at a critical point in time. UM has been using the platform for the past six months to evaluate different approaches to targeting audiences for their brands during the pandemic. 

“Often, there is too much weight placed on Google Trends when it comes to audience assumptions and the decisions that follow – but we know at Captify how important it is not to mistake search volume as the only proxy for actual consumer intent – we go much deeper and much wider for a more connected view,” said Dominic Joseph, co-founder and chief executive officer, Captify. “With input from our partners, our engineering and product teams have built a self-service platform equipped with the tools to create successful business strategies that facilitate planning and activation in one single interface. UM continues to be a boundary-pushing agency, helping to influence how the platform has evolved and ensuring it is built for the people that use it.” 

“We’re proud to have been the first agency armed with the power of Sense, helping us offer our clients the opportunity to leverage Search Intelligence to understand in-market audience behavior in a privacy-first and cookieless way,” said Hamish Kinniburgh, Global Chief Strategy Officer, UM. “What has become abundantly clear, and accelerated by the pandemic, is that fresh, dynamic, real-time insights create strategic advantage for brands. Sense plays a key part in delivering that to our clients, helping us future proof their business.”

Find out more information about Sense here.