Ask any marketer how they build audiences today, and you’ll hear a familiar story: toggling through data sources, checking endless boxes, and retracing steps every time a new campaign launches. It’s repetitive, time‑consuming, and hard to scale across partners.
That’s exactly what PubMatic’s AI-powered Audience Discovery tool is solving for advertisers and agencies using PubMatic for Buyers – transforming audience planning from a manual, multi‑step process into a simple, conversational experience.
A Smarter Way to Discover Audiences
Audience targeting has traditionally been one of the most time-consuming, expertise-heavy parts of programmatic advertising. Marketers spend hours combing through lists of audience segments to find the ones that best align with their campaign goals.
With Audience Discovery, buyers can now simply describe their audience goals in plain English – or even enter a brand’s website URL – and let AI handle the heavy lifting.
For example:
“Build an audience of NFL game-day viewers who use grocery delivery apps, ages 25–65.”
Within seconds, PubMatic’s AI interprets the intent, analyzes real audience data, and recommends segments ranked by relevance, reach, and cost efficiency.
Two Ways to Power Your Discovery
- Natural Language Audience Creation: Buyers can describe their campaign goals using simple natural‑language prompts. Our Gen AI then interprets the full context of each request, identifying the most relevant audience attributes, including behaviors, demographics, affinities, and real‑world intent signals.From there, large language models evaluate, recommend, and rank thousands of audience segments across our trusted data partners through a multi‑signal scoring framework that blends:
- Semantic relevance: How closely each segment aligns with the buyer’s intent
- Audience reach: Ensuring recommendations can scale for meaningful delivery
- Cost efficiency: Prioritizing segments that perform within competitive CPM ranges
- URL-Based Audience Generation: Alternatively, buyers can simply enter an advertiser’s website URL. This can be a URL from any page on the advertiser’s site: product page, category page, home page, or any where else. The system reviews the site in real time, analyzes its metadata, product descriptions, and content to determine the business category, target consumer, and advertised services – then automatically recommends aligned audience segments
Together, these two modes make audience building flexible for every buyer, from data-driven agencies to marketers seeking a quick, intelligent starting point.
From Manual to Magical In Minutes
Here’s how it works behind the scenes:
- Understands intent: The AI extracts key entities, industries, and demographics from natural language or website content.
- Maps to data: It connects those concepts to PubMatic’s curated network of audience segments.
- Ranks and recommends: It scores potential matches by relevance, reach, and cost before surfacing the strongest options.
This transparent, data‑backed workflow turns hours of manual setup into minutes, while giving buyers full control and clarity at every step
Why It Matters
Audience creation no longer needs to be tedious or technical. With AI-powered Audience Discovery, advertisers can:
- Reduce audience build time from hours to minutes
- Eliminate the learning curve of manual segment selection
- Increase trust through explainable, data-backed recommendations
- Accelerate campaign setup and activation directly within Activate
Just as autopay reshaped how we manage everyday transactions, Gen AI is redefining how advertisers approach audience targeting, freeing teams to focus less on mechanics and more on strategy.
From Faster to Smarter
Audience Discovery builds on our other recently launched AI capabilities – including campaign monitoring and inventory curation – to deliver buyers a seamless, AI‑driven experience from strategy through activation.
Now, the system recommends audiences, inventory, and set-ups based on real-time signals for buyers to proactively plan, activate, and optimize campaigns.
See It in Action
Watch the short demo below to see how our Audience Discovery tool makes audience planning conversational, accurate, and actionable.
Try it today by reaching out to your PubMatic rep or contact us any time.
This launch is just the beginning of a new chapter in programmatic, one where AI enhances human insight to deliver smarter outcomes.