Buying ad space shouldn’t take eons, and yet…
You need to propose a campaign budget based on the size of your target audience, but you have to contact your data provider directly to get counts.
You have budget approval, and you’re ready to create your campaign, but your data provider has to send your audience to the right ad platforms, which requires a separate request and several days of downtime.
It’s time to optimize; all you want to do is update your audience, but start stretching because you’re about to jump through several hoops.
Tunnl has built hundreds of issue-based audiences to make targeting faster and more accurate for advertisers like you, but what good are audiences you can’t access in your ad platforms?
Enter audience syndication, the process that puts audiences like ours on advertising and demand-side platforms (DSPs) like the ones you use to launch your campaigns. How does this process eliminate the middleman and improve your advertising process? It goes a little like this.
What is Audience Syndication?
When a data provider’s audience is “syndicated,” the audience is always readily available 24/7 in an advertising or demand-side platform’s audience library. Audience syndication occurs when an advertising platform partners with a data provider to store and allow for transactions to occur on a provider’s audiences in their platform.
For example, Tunnl is an audience data provider with hundreds of prebuilt audiences available for advertisers. Several DSPs and ad platforms house our segments in their own audience library to make that audience data available to advertisers in one place, streamlining your media planning and placement into a single hub. The Tunnl audiences housed on those ad platforms and DSPs are considered “syndicated.”
Why Do Demand-Side Platforms Syndicate Audiences?
These are the two significant reasons why ad platforms and DSPs syndicate audiences.
1. Seamless access to more audience data and targeting options improves your user experience on their platform.
2. It’s more convenient to make audiences easily accessible within their platform to limit the reasons advertisers like you would need to request support or exit the platform to access additional data.
And those audience syndication perks trickle down to advertisers like you in a few crucial ways.
How Does Audience Syndication Affect My Ad Buying Process?
There’s a lot of “hurry up and wait” between you and a launched campaign. Syndication is one way data providers and ad platforms can give you the autonomy you deserve as an advertiser.
By syndicating audiences, DSPs like Tunnl’s partners at Basis, StackAdapt, and Yahoo Advertising simplify your ad-buying process, save you time, and put you back in control of your campaigns. Here’s exactly what that looks like:
- Access syndicated audiences instantly within ad platforms and DSPs for faster ad implementation and optimization.
- Unify your target audience data in a single platform to eliminate the annoying experience of bouncing between tabs and platforms.
- Capitalize on targeting opportunities that used to slip through the cracks because you were short on time or used disjointed data.
- Sync your target audiences across multiple platforms to reach them consistently with multi-channel campaigns you can launch all at once from a single DSP.
- Work autonomously without contacting a data provider for every audience you want to use.
- Plan and place campaigns at any time, even nights and weekends, since you won’t need to wait on a data provider to do so.
Feel like you’ve been accessing audiences all wrong? You may have already used a syndicated audience on your preferred ad platform or DSP without realizing it - that’s how seamless the process can be.
But if you want to be more intentional about using Tunnl’s proprietary audience data in your campaigns, there are plenty of places to find syndicated data to act on right now.
Where Can I Find Syndicated Audiences?
Most advertising and demand-side platforms offer an audience library replete with proprietary and syndicated audience data for advertisers like you to tap into as they place their ads.
Tunnl has an ever-growing roster of ad platforms and DSP partners that host our prebuilt audiences in their own audience libraries. You can find hundreds of Tunnl's audiences on:
- Basis
- DirectTV/Dish
- Google Data Marketplace
- StackAdapt
- Xandr
- Yahoo/Verizon's DSP
While our partners host many of our prebuilt audiences, it is ultimately their decision which ones to offer. But how do they decide?
How Do Demand-Side Platforms Choose Audiences for Syndication?
Even when an ad platform or DSP partners with a data provider, not all of the provider’s audiences will get syndicated. Each platform has its own audience syndication criteria - things that qualify and disqualify audiences from consideration - but there are consistent themes across the board.
Typically, the audiences chosen for syndication are (or would be) popular among platform users and are not based on:
- Political data, e.g., political party affiliation
- Health data, e.g., medical conditions
- Negative data, e.g., low credit scores
- Sensitive data, e.g., personally identifiable information
Some platforms have more stringent criteria than others, and some only request a set number of audiences for syndication at a time, so the breadth and type of audiences you find on each DSP will vary. In Xandr and Google’s Data Marketplace, only 180 of Tunnl’s audiences are syndicated, but all of our audiences are syndicated in the Yahoo/Verizon DSP. It really just depends on the platform.
Tunnl Tip: Wondering if a prebuilt audience you’re interested in is syndicated on a particular DSP? Search for Tunnl in their audience selector to see what’s available.
We have plans to continue syndicating our audiences in as many DSPs as possible to make advertising with accurate audience data easier for advertisers like you. Let us know if there is another platform where syndicated Tunnl audiences would help you.
If you don’t see a Tunnl audience you want to use in your ad platform or DSP, it may not be syndicated, but you can certainly still advertise against the audience with a couple of extra steps.
How Do I Use Tunnl Audiences That Aren’t Syndicated?
Syndication is the smoothest way to access Tunnl audiences for your ads, but it’s not the only way. For audiences that haven’t been added to your ad platform’s data library yet, you will need to reach out to the Tunnl team, so we can send a prebuilt audience over from the Tunnl platform to your ad platform or DSP for use in your campaign. We call this audience activation. 
We’ve made that process as hands-off as possible to keep you in the driver’s seat of your ad planning and placement. We don’t want to slow you down.
Here’s how to send a Tunnl audience to your ad platform or DSP:
- Sign into or create your free Tunnl account.
- Use the Audience Explorer to find the audience you want to use in your campaign.
- Click the “Activate” button.
- Complete the simple audience activation form.
- We’ll handle the transfer and let you know when it’s ready (in a business day or two).
While it’s not as independent as instantly applying a syndicated audience to your campaign in an ad platform, the Tunnl platform - including the audience activation process - is designed to eliminate as much back-and-forth communication as possible between you and your audience data provider (us).
We love to hear from you, but we know you can (and prefer to) pull audience counts on your own, analyze audience insights independently, and keep the ball rolling on your campaigns when it’s convenient. So, we do our best to give you the goods and get out of your way. Everything you need to know about an audience is accessible via our free platform.
The only thing you would require us to do for you is to survey and build a custom audience, or send syndicated audiences to ad platforms.
How to Capitalize on Syndicated Audiences for Your Campaigns
Jumping through hoops is the old way of audience-based advertising. When you need to reach issue-based audiences fast, there’s nothing more frustrating than waiting on another team to get you what you need.
Audience syndication is a step in the right direction, and accessing syndicated audiences from data providers like Tunnl is easy when you know where to look. Your experience may vary from platform to platform regarding which audiences are available or how they calculate data usage fees, but there are several demand-side platforms that offer syndicated audiences to ease your audience targeting.
You’ll find Tunnl audiences on your favorite DSPs, like Basis, StackAdapt, Xandr, Google’s Data Marketplace, Yahoo/Verizon’s DSP, and DirectTV/Dish. Whichever you use, you can count on Tunnl’s syndicated audiences for accurate, up-to-date targeting on the key issues in your campaigns.
To browse all of Tunnl’s prebuilt audiences, analyze insights about your target segments, and even use our extensive data library to DIY your own custom audiences to use across DSPs and ad platforms with the free Advanced Search feature, create or log into your free Tunnl platform account.
You may even find a few audiences you want to activate while you’re in there.