AUDIENCES – Best Use of Data & Audiences

About AUDIENCES

AUDIENCES is independent, cloud-native software that enables brands to turn their first-party customer data into audiences they can activate across digital advertising. Our technology deploys directly within a brand’s existing cloud environment, enabling teams to build, activate and govern audiences without moving or duplicating customer data. We give brands greater control, interoperability and ownership of their data activation, with transparent flat-fee pricing rather than a tax on data usage.

The challenge

Brands have invested heavily in CRM, loyalty programmes and first-party customer data, building an increasingly rich understanding of who their customers are and how they behave. Yet much of that intelligence still fails to influence day-to-day paid media, where marketers can remain reliant on broad platform targeting and third-party signals.

The problem is often structural. Traditional activation models can require customer data to be copied, transferred or matched through external platforms before it can be used in advertising. That introduces additional complexity around privacy, governance, cost and control.

For Pets at Home, the opportunity was significant: 8.2 million active Pets Club members, generating rich behavioural and transactional insight. The challenge was turning that intelligence into actionable audiences across paid media without compromising customer privacy or moving sensitive data outside Pets at Home’s own environment.

The solution

The strategic approach

Our approach starts with a simple principle, that brands should not have to move customer data in order to use it. Instead of extracting Pets at Home’s first-party data into another platform, AUDIENCES deployed directly within its existing cloud environment. This created an activation layer where audiences could be built from behavioural and transactional data and made available across paid media, while Pets at Home retained control of the underlying customer information.

The technology deployed

AUDIENCES is cloud-native audience activation software, built from day one to operate within a customer’s existing cloud infrastructure rather than requiring data to be transferred into another platform. Because AUDIENCES operates where the data already lives, there was no need to maintain additional copies of sensitive customer data in an external store, giving Pets at Home greater control and governance over how its data was accessed and used while marketing teams turned that data into actionable audience signals.

The boldest decision

The boldest decision was architectural. Don’t move the data. Rather than bringing the data to the software, we brought the software to the data. That challenged the assumption that brands must trade control and governance for marketing performance, and created a cloud-native activation model that could scale with Pets at Home’s data, audiences and media strategy while proving privacy, ownership and performance can work together.

The results

ROAS rose by 18%. Exclusions cut wasted spend, high-value lookalikes made acquisition more effective, and tailored campaigns improved retention and lifetime value among existing customers. These strategic changes unlocked significant incremental revenue.

Pets at Home demonstrated that first-party data does not need to leave a brand’s environment to become a powerful marketing asset. The solution was not a one-off optimisation or campaign tactic. It established scalable activation infrastructure through which first-party data could continually influence media decisions, proving that privacy and performance do not have to be competing priorities.