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To measure the campaign, Dotdash Meredith worked with third-party research provider InMarket, which uses a panel of people who agree to share their data, including location and purchase behaviors.

Dotdash Meredith tagged the creative it used for Pandora, which allowed InMarket to compare the impact of exposure to the Dotdash Meredith campaign against a control group that had not been exposed.

The results found that consumers exposed to the D/Cipher intent-targeting tool visited Pandora physical stores at a 76% higher rate than those not exposed to it — a lift three times higher than the typical InMarket benchmark. Nearly half of this incremental lift came from new consumer purchases, according to McAndrews.

“Whether or not third-party cookies exist, D/Cipher and its custom intent targeting are more valuable to us,” McAndrews said. “It also allows you to tap into the Apple iOs audience, which is incredibly valuable. So bigger reach, more targeted, right dollars, right place, right time.”

In total, across 27 client case studies since its launch, D/Cipher targeting has consistently outperformed all other forms of targeting, according to Van Kirk.

Dotdash Meredith continues its momentum

The continued traction of D/Cipher comes on the heels of news that Google no longer plans to deprecate third-party cookies. 

The July announcement has left the advertising industry scrambling to anticipate how the about-face will affect signal loss across the open web.

But D/Cipher, which blends the high-intent nature of Dotdash Meredith content with machine learning, allows brands to serve relevant ads to users without third-party cookies or alternative identifiers, circumventing the issue entirely. 

It also enables advertisers to serve relevant ads to users in cookieless environments, such as Safari, which make up nearly 50% of all web inventory, according to a recent estimate from 33Across. 

Dotdash Meredith is also one of a number of media companies to sign a licensing partnership with the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI. In addition to a revenue source, the deal allows Dotdash Meredith to use OpenAI technology to improve its audience segmentation capabilities, which it hopes will further improve its targeting in the coming months.

“We believe digital revenue will accelerate from here and growth could exceed 15% in the third quarter,” Levin said. “If incremental revenue continues to convert to digital-adjusted Ebitda at current rates, we should be growing digital-adjusted Ebitda at least 25% in the upcoming quarter.”