NIQ & The Trade Desk: Smarter Shopper Targeting

1. How does your partnership with The Trade Desk align with your broader mission to deliver omnichannel consumer intelligence to advertisers?

NIQ’s media division is dedicated to helping marketers and media owners around the world plan, activate, and measure their media investments with greater precision and impact.

We do this through a unique combination of global data assets that include: 1) unmatched purchase-based insights, 2) deep intelligence on consumer attributes (MRI-Simmons), 3) and measurement of media consumption (GfK Media Measurement). 

As one of the largest DSPs for programmatic media globally, our partnership with The Trade Desk is an important part of this journey.  Through this partnership, we enable brands to develop and activate audiences from NIQ’s diverse data assets directly through The Trade Desk’s powerful programmatic platform.  The Trade Desk’s global presence also ensures we can provide high-quality data solutions to multinational brands and publishers, which was a key need we were asked to solve.

2. What methodologies are used to create these shopper-based audience segments, and how frequently are they updated?

We have two distinct types of audience segments in The Trade Desk; segments based on consumer data, and segments based on retail sales data.  Each uses a different methodology.

For our consumer-based Buyer Propensity segments, we integrate our assets with Consumer Canvas, a national file for the US that has been curated from various data sources, then weighted and calibrated to accurately represent the full adult population.  We then train different predictive models to develop the final audiences, which get integrated into third party platforms or sent directly to advertisers.

Buyer Propensity audiences are updated quarterly to adjust for changes in populations and to ensure we respect consumer privacy and opt-outs in accordance with reguatory policies

For our GeoPurchase audiences, we use methodology grounded in postcode-level demand indexing, which enables us to identify hyper-local demand patterns with unparalleled precision and national reach.

The data is normalized and population-weighted to remove statistical noise and focus on postcodes that offer the greatest commercial opportunity. Segment sizes are dynamically scaled based on category penetration.  Seasonal demand forecasting is also included to account for behavioral shifts throughout the year.

For custom use cases, we apply segmentation using K-means clustering across our postcode-level sales data. This allows us to uncover natural demand groups for an individual brand, key competitors, and the product category. Postcode clusters provide a foundation for marketing campaigns by helping marketers identify strongholds, areas for conquest, white space, and low performing areas to exclude from future campaigns.

Custom segments are refreshed monthly with seasonal forecasting applied. This ensures clients are working with relevant, timely data without sacrificing the continuity needed for meaningful performance analysis.

3. How do these segments perform when compared to standard demographic or interest-based targeting?

Like many advanced audience segments, our Buyer Propensity audiences allow marketers to buy far less waste than standard demographic targets.  For example, a cosmetic brand targeting Women 25-44 might reach an audience of 44 million Women, but only 19 million women who are actually in market for cosmetics.  This is a huge waste.  By leveraging NIQ’s Buyer Propensity audiences, marketers can pinpoint exactly the consumers they want to reach.  This allows them to spend their media dollars more effectively and drive better bottom-line results. 

NIQ’s GeoPurchase segments aren’t necessarily designed to compete with audience or interest-based targeting. They’re built to provide a privacy-conscious path to optimize the geo-targeting layer of your campaign. Our methodology uses real sales outcomes to identify areas of true demand for your brand or category. It lets us factually segment your market into areas you’re winning, areas where your competitor is winning, and areas of untapped growth potential. This can help lay the foundation of your targeting strategy, which can be supplemented with other consumer attributes.

It allows advertisers to move beyond predicted interest and anchor strategy in actual purchasing behavior.

GeoPurchase segments can also work in tandem with audience-based targeting. When overlaid with ID-based strategies, they help advertisers isolate their target audience within the most commercially valuable areas. That means more efficient media spend, greater relevance, and stronger outcomes. They’re a powerful tool for FMCG brands looking to tailor their activation based on real consumer demand and local competitive dynamics.

Ultimately, GeoPurchase audiences don’t compete with or replace audience targeting; it supercharges it with outcome-driven signals that ensure you’re reaching the right people in the right places.

4. What measures are in place to ensure anonymization and ethical use of shopper data in advertising activation?

At NIQ we have strict data governance and privacy standards to ensure the protection of consumer privacy, as well as the integrity of our data assets. 

For our Buyer Propensity audiences, our strict data governance and compliance policies ensure we adhere to all regulatory or business requirements to guarantee consumer privacy.  We use privacy preserving techniques to ensure the identity of our panelists are never revealed and that the data we build our Buyer Propensity audiences with is permissioned correctly.

GeoPurchase segments are built with privacy and ethical data use at their core. This data comes directly from retail tills, meaning it reflects real, deterministic sales outcomes, not inferred behavior from loyalty cards, panels, or households. Importantly, this sales data is fully anonymized and aggregated before use, ensuring that neither individual consumers nor specific retailer stores can be identified.

To protect our retail partners, we strip out store-level identifiers and apply postcode-level reattribution, using population and sociodemographic data from our panels to distribute demand safely across postcode sectors. This step is crucial, since we are intending to target households within a store’s sphere of influence, rather than the specific postcode of a store where this data originated.

We also work directly with partners like The Trade Desk to ensure our data aligns with their specific privacy standards. We only provide postcode sector-level data.  Any sectors that fall below compliant population thresholds are automatically excluded from our targeting methodology and from TTD’s activation environment.

In short, while our GeoPurchase targeting is grounded in real-world sales behavior, it is fully anonymized to ensure 100% compliance with privacy regulations, safeguarding both individual households and our retail partnerships.

5. How do you plan to evolve your offering within programmatic platforms beyond the integration?  

In the future, we will support marketers’ ability to dynamically update their advanced audience targets more quickly than ever before.  This will allow advertisers to optimize their media investments during a campaign, shortening the feedback cycle to drive better ROI.   

6. What innovations can brands expect in shopper-based targeting as NIQ expands globally through 2025?

Throughout the rest of 2025, we’ll be expanding our international footprint by releasing new audience segments in the Americas and Europe, with Asia Pacific and Latin America to follow soon after.

Our most important innovation this year will be to combine the strengths of our individual data assets into powerful, multi-dimensional audiences that are completely new to the market. 

For example, we’ll be integrating consumer psychographics and advanced demos from MRI-Simmons with purchase-based segments from NIQ to create multi-dimensional audiences that incorporate consumer actions and consumer mindsets.  These types of holistic audiences will allow marketers to target people who are likely to purchase a specific product further segmented by their lifestyle, interest, attitudes, or beliefs.  By developing such segments, we’ll enable marketers to customize their messaging and targeting strategies to drive superior campaign performance and ROAS.