Audience prospecting firm Illuma has launched in Australia and appointed former Unruly ANZ boss Lance Traore as country manager, AdNews can reveal.
Illuma is an independent advertising technology company that connects publishers and advertisers to audiences through an ‘intelligent prospecting system’.
Australia and New Zealand are the first international markets the UK-based ad tech firm has expanded to.
In the UK, Illuma has clients such as British Airways i360, CNBC, Expedia, Fujitsu and The Guardian on its books.
The Illuma system works by identifying the best performing pages in a campaign and then uses machine learning to help advertisers serve ads to similar high performing pages.
“Let’s say you are running a highly optimised campaign and from 100 impressions, three of those impressions convert,” Traore tells AdNews.
“The Illuma system will identify these high performing pages and pull out every signal from that page, such as positioning, keyword, category, the page construct and other elements. It then uses machine learning to prospect millions of other pages to find the closest matching pages and placements.
“Because it is not reliant on cookies, it means you can scale it a lot more than using traditional cookie-based targeting tools while maintaining efficiency. We call it intelligenct reach.”
Cookie-less targeting
Traore will be charged with forming partnerships with brands, agencies and publishers. The Swede brings more than 15 years’ experience in media and advertising to the role. Aside from Unruly, where he spent more than six years, he has worked at OMD, GoViral, Adlink and MTG Radio in Stockholm.
“I’m excited to join Illuma, especially at a time when the industry has an urgent need to find new and better ways to scale their advertising campaigns,” Traore said in a press statement.
“Audience targeting based on third-party data has become the de facto industry tactic, but has serious flaws. Especially with certain browsers now blocking third-party tracking, and legislation like the upcoming GDPR, both the industry and consumers are starting to question it more and more.
“We are even seeing certain companies in the data exchange, location and cross-device arenas trying to rebrand themselves completely.”
Illuma managing director Duncan Arthur said the growth ad maturity of programmatically traded advertising in Australia and New Zealand made it ideal to grow the business globally.
“Lance is the ideal person to develop and build Illuma across the region, and we are delighted to have him join us,” Arthur said.
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