In our Ask the Expert series, we interview leaders from our partner organizations who are helping lead their brands to new heights in AdTech. Today’s interview is with Brian Mandelbaum, CEO and Co-Founder at Attain.
About Attain
Built for privacy — with visibility across all retailers, verticals and purchases — Attain provides solutions for the modern marketer. Its real-time measurement and optimization solutions coupled with high-fidelity audiences and proprietary insights enable marketers to drive valuable business outcomes.
The power of transaction-based audiences
Attain’s real-time transaction data provides a 360-degree view of consumer behavior. What makes this approach more effective than traditional demographic or behavioral targeting?
Attain is the industry’s most trusted source of live purchase data, powered by a robust panel of 8 million fully permissioned consumers. Our platform delivers unmatched, real-time visibility into consumer purchase behavior across retailers, industries, and payment methods. Marketers gain deep insights — such as in-store vs. online purchases, payment methods, purchase frequency, cart contents, and average transaction value — enabling more precise audience targeting and media strategies. With Attain’s rich, transaction-based data, marketers can optimize campaigns with direct, actionable sales signals.
Ensuring data accuracy and relevance
Attain curates audiences using real-time transaction data, but advertisers often ask whether this data is deterministic or probabilistic. Can you clarify your methodology, and if probabilistic, how do you ensure accuracy and representation across the entire US population?
Our transaction data comes directly from the largest live purchase data panel in the U.S. Covering over 10,000+ merchants and $600B in cumulative spend, our dataset offers a complete and dynamic view of real-world purchase behavior. Using advanced machine learning, we scale this data to represent the entire U.S. population with unmatched accuracy, ensuring a balanced and unbiased reflection of consumer spending patterns. Our rigorous methodology eliminates outliers, continuously optimizing for precision and stability, so marketers can trust our insights for better targeting, measurement, and optimization.
Privacy-first data practices
Attain is built on a privacy-first, consumer-permissioned model. There are many ways to capture purchase data—why did Attain choose a panel-based approach, and how does this method compare to other collection strategies in terms of accuracy, scale, and compliance?
Attain’s panel-based approach is the foundation of our privacy-first, consumer-permissioned model. By capturing real-time transaction data directly from our opted-in consumer panel, we ensure unmatched accuracy and ethical data sourcing — paramount in today’s privacy-conscious world.
In exchange for sharing their data, consumers receive valuable benefits like early wages, savings tools, and shopping rewards, with no hidden fees. Unlike legacy third party data providers, our directly sourced transaction data provides deeper, more precise insights, enabling highly granular and actionable audience segments.
Our continuously growing panel reflects a broad cross-section of U.S. consumers while maintaining strict privacy and compliance standards. We fully adhere to regulations like CCPA and GDPR, giving both consumers and advertisers confidence in the responsible use of data. Attain’s approach delivers the ideal balance of accuracy, scale, and compliance—while prioritizing consumer trust.
Cross-channel addressability
With brands activating audiences across display, mobile, and CTV, how does Attain’s purchase data help advertisers refine their cross-channel strategies?
Attain’s purchase data empowers advertisers to refine cross-channel strategies with smarter, data-driven insights. Our real-time transaction-based audiences enable scalable activation across display, social, online video, and addressable TV — ensuring campaigns reach high-intent buyers more likely to convert.
By applying purchase-based audiences across all channels, marketers are utilizing the strongest signals possible, which enables a more effective holistic strategy to drive to that ultimate sales outcome. Whether through social media, TV/CTV, mobile, or programmatic platforms, Attain helps brands connect with consumers at key moments in their buying journey, maximizing media impact with real behavioral insights instead of proxies.
With an expansive and growing network of media partners, Attain ensures brands reach their audiences wherever they are, delivering consistent, high-impact messaging. Whether optimizing for brand awareness or performance, our data helps marketers make smarter decisions to drive superior results.
Proven performance with live purchase feedback
Attain moves beyond traditional proxy metrics by providing live purchase data. How does this help advertisers optimize campaigns while they’re still running?
What sets Attain’s audiences apart isn’t just the data fidelity and holistic coverage of consumer behavior, it’s that they’re built and validated using live, privacy-safe purchase signals. Advertisers can execute campaigns confidently, knowing that they’re reaching real consumers based on recent, real-world transactions, not outdated models or inferred, probabilistic behaviors.
Attain’s ability to measure sales lift across a wide range of inputs means that marketers can easily understand which audiences are driving actual sales outcomes during flight. This unlocks smarter mid-campaign optimizations, discovering new audiences, and fine-tuning targeting — to ensure audience performance continually improves against real revenue goals.
Attain’s closed-loop approach gives advertisers a faster path from targeting to transaction, helping brands maximize the value of every impression.
Industry-specific use cases
Beyond CPG, Attain supports industries like QSR, retail, and financial services. Can you share a compelling example of how brands in these verticals are utilizing your audiences?
Attain’s audiences provide a comprehensive view of the consumer, capturing all aspects of their purchase behaviors — from travel and dining to TV content consumption and shopping habits. This broad perspective offers brands a far richer set of buying signals than ever before, enabling them to make more informed decisions across the entire consumer journey.
- Quick service restaurants (QSR): With a comprehensive view across all transaction types (cash, credit, debit) – Attain enables QSRs to capture a full picture of customer spend at their nationwide locations. Ensuring these brands have holistic coverage across all sales channels, powered by a direct relationship with the consumer, Attain captures transactions both in-store, online, and through 3P delivery apps like UberEats and Grubhub. This powers Attain’s deep insights, which QSRs can use for intelligent, precise targeting- including frequent visitors, competitive share, products purchased, and more. QSRs can use this data to solve a variety of business objectives, like retention/growth, competitive conquesting, and more.
- Retail: In retail, Attain provides a wide range of audience segments, including loyalty shoppers, in-market buyers, competitive shoppers, and even adjacent buyers who may be interested in similar products. By combining these segments, retailers can optimize their campaigns to target real-time shoppers with the highest intent, rather than relying on outdated or generalized profiles that other providers might offer. Additionally, with our industry-leading refresh rate, brands benefit from the most up-to-date data, ensuring their campaigns are always aligned with the latest consumer behaviors.
- Financial services: In the financial services sector, Attain’s purchase data helps identify consumers who are actively considering financial products such as credit cards or loans. By understanding their purchasing behaviors, marketers can deliver highly personalized and relevant offers to those already displaying intent, leading to better conversion rates and more effective acquisition strategies.
Integration with Experian’s marketplace
Attain is now available through the Experian marketplace. How does this integration make it easier for advertisers to activate and scale your audiences?
Attain’s integration with Experian marketplace makes it easier than ever for advertisers to activate our purchase-based audiences across TV, social, and programmatic. This partnership makes Attain’s data even more accessible, supporting our mission to build the most comprehensive and trusted consumer data ecosystem.
With direct access to our real-time audiences within Experian’s marketplace, advertisers can more efficiently launch campaigns at scale and make more precise, data-driven decisions. As one of Experian’s inaugural partners, we’ve already seen strong adoption and demand, reinforcing the value of this partnership.
The future of transaction-based targeting
As the use of transaction data in advertising continues to grow, what changes do you anticipate in how brands will apply it for targeting and measurement? And how is Attain evolving its approach to support those shifts?
As transaction data reshapes advertising, brands can shift from targeting probabilistic audiences to reaching high-intent consumers for greater ad relevance and conversions. Purchase data also unlocks highly accurate incrementality measurement, closing the loop and revealing which tactics and channels drive true incremental sales.
Attain’s platform is built for outcomes-driven advertising, capturing data across the entire media cycle to continuously optimize performance. As we continue to make investments in AI and machine learning into our platform, our insights will become even more actionable and efficient — helping brands maximize impact, drive incrementality, and fuel long-term growth.
Thanks for the interview. Any recommendations for our readers if they want to learn more?
To explore our audience segments, visit the Attain website or contact your Experian account representative to schedule your free match test.
Contact us today
About our expert
Brian Mandelbaum, CEO and Co-Founder, Attain
Brian Mandelbaum, a veteran entrepreneur and investor, is the co-founder and CEO of Attain, North America’s largest opt-in purchase platform. Prior to Attain, Brian founded Clearstream TV, a data-enabled video distribution platform acquired by Engine Group in 2015. He brings over 20 years of experience in data-driven digital media, collaborating with top agencies and major brands.
Latest posts
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As Oracle exits the advertising space, we understand that this may present a challenge. Experian is here to support you with a seamless transition in your audience targeting. As one of Oracle’s primary data providers that powered their audiences, we’ve mapped Oracle audiences to Experian audiences, helping you to switch your audience targeting with no impact on your campaign’s performance. In this blog post, we highlight four audience categories that we know marketers are actively seeking to replace and target: auto, restaurants, lifestyle and interests, and demographics. Experian’s approach to best-in-class audience targeting Experian’s 2,400+ syndicated audiences are available directly on over 30 leading television, social, programmatic advertising platforms, and directly within Audigent for activation within private marketplaces (PMPs). Reach consumers based on who they are, where they live, and their household makeup. 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Experian’s auto audiences are built utilizing insight from our North American Vehicle Database℠ and other data attributes from Experian Marketing Data to provide highly accurate audiences for digital and TV advertising. Unlike some of our competitors who are also positioning themselves as a replacement audience provider, Experian owns all our Vehicle, Consumer, and summarized Credit data under one umbrella and refreshes our audiences every 30 days. This ensures tighter audience composition, superior data hygiene, and best in-class data fidelity, which means you get to target the most accurate audiences. With over 750 syndicated audiences segmented by make, model, price, vehicle age, fuel type, and more, our data is accessible through Experian’s distribution power across all platforms — digital, TV, programmatic, and social — allowing activation wherever our partners need it. Here are the 10 most popular Experian audiences that align with Oracle’s auto audiences: Audience by OracleExperian audienceAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > In-Market > Body Styles > SUVs and CrossoversAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-Body Styles > SUV and CUVAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > In-Market > Body Styles > Trucks > Mid-Size Pickup TrucksAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-Body Styles > Mid-Size TruckAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > In-Market > Body Styles > Trucks > Full-Size Pickup TrucksAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-Body Styles > Full-Size TrucksAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > In-Market > Body Styles > SUVs and Crossovers > SUVs > Small to Mid-Size SUVAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-Body Styles > Small Mid-Size SUVAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > In-Market > Body Styles > SUVs and Crossovers > SUVsAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-Body Styles > SUVAudiences by Oracle > Financial Services > Insurance > In-Market > Auto InsuranceLifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > In-Market > Auto InsuranceAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > Merchant Category Audiences > Auto Insurance High SpendersRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Automotive (Cars & Trucks) > Auto Insurance: High SpendersOracle BlueKai > In-Market > Auto, Cars and Trucks > Condition > Used Cars > More than 5 years oldAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-New/Used > Used car 6+ yearsAudiences by Oracle > Auto, Cars and Trucks > In-Market > Condition > Used > Less than 5 years oldAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-New/Used > Used car 0-5 yearsOracle BlueKai > In-Market > Auto, Cars and Trucks > Classes > Cars > Compact and Sub-Compact CarsAutos, Cars and Trucks > In Market-Body Styles > Compact or Subcompact Cars Lifestyle and Interests Experian’s Lifestyle and Interests data helps you reach and target consumers based on their predicted lifestyle and behavioral characteristics with data sourced from consumer surveys, research panels, and online behaviors, enabling more personalized and impactful marketing strategies. Here are five of the most popular Experian audiences that align with Oracle's lifestyle and interest audiences: Audience by OracleExperian audienceAudiences by Oracle > Hobbies and Interests (Affinity) > Pets > DogsLifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Pets > Dog OwnersAudiences by Oracle > Hobbies and Interests (Affinity) > Pets > CatsLifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Pets > Cat OwnersAudiences by Oracle > Hobbies and Interests (Affinity) > Health and Fitness > ExerciseLifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Health & Fitness > Fitness EnthusiastOracle DLX (Datalogix) > DLX Finance > InvestorsLifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Investors > Active InvestorAudiences by Oracle > Lifestyles > Merchant Category Audiences > Sports LoversLifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Sports and Recreation > Sports Enthusiast Demographics Experian’s demographic data allows marketers to tap into the accurate data from Experian Marketing Data to refine audiences to meet a brand’s target persona. Our demographic audiences deliver insight into age, gender, income, and household attributes such as home ownership, presence of children in the household, and length of residence. Based on customer feedback, we have expanded our range of age-based audience segments. These new segments cover various adult age groups and gender distinctions (e.g., Adult Females 18-39, Adult Males 35-54). Here are seven of the most popular Experian audiences that align with Oracle's demographic audiences: Audience by Oracle Experian audienceAudiences by Oracle > Demographics > Validated Demographics > Household Income > HHI: $100,000+Demographics > Household Income (HHI) > $100,000+Audiences by Oracle > Real Estate and Home Property Services > Real Estate Attributes > Ownership > Home OwnersDemographics > Homeowners/Renters > HomeownerAudiences by Oracle > Demographics > Age Groups > Adults 25-54Demographics > Ages > 25-54Audiences by Oracle > Demographics > Gender > FemalesDemographics > Gender > FemaleAudiences by Oracle > Demographics > Validated Demographics > Age Groups > Adults 25-54 > Females 25-54Demographics > Ages > Female 25-54Audiences by Oracle > Demographics > Age Broad > Ages 40-49Demographics > Ages > 40-49Audiences by Oracle > Demographics > Validated Demographics > Age Broad > Ages 65+Demographics > Ages > 65+ Quick Service Restaurants (QSR) Here are six of the most popular Experian audiences that align with Oracle's QSR audiences: Audience by OracleExperian audienceAudiences by Oracle > Restaurants > Merchant Category Audiences > In Store QSR Fast Food Frequent SpendersRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Fast Food/QSR QSR Frequent SpendersAudiences by Oracle > Restaurants > Merchant Category Audiences > QSR Chicken Frequent SpendersRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Fast Food/QSR Chicken Frequent SpendersAudiences by Oracle > Restaurants > Merchant Category Audiences > QSR Burgers Frequent SpendersRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Fast Food/QSR Burger Frequent SpendersAudiences by Oracle > Restaurants > Cuisine Type > SandwichesRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Fast Food/QSR Subs and Sandwich Frequent SpendersAudiences by Oracle > Restaurants > Dining Type > Casual DiningRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Casual Dining Frequent SpendersAudiences by Oracle > Restaurants > Dining Type > Coffee Shops and CafesRetail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Coffee Frequent Spenders Switch from Oracle to Experian audiences with ease Experian is here to make it easy for advertisers and agencies to find the right audience solutions after Oracle’s exit. By partnering with us, you work with a single data provider that offers access to a diverse range of audiences across multiple categories, including political and holiday shopping. Our audiences are available for activation on the leading demand, supply, social, and TV platforms. Reach out to your account representative or our audience team for information about our comprehensive audience mapping and finding the right audiences for your campaigns. Connect with our audience team Download our audience lookbook to discover more about Experian’s audiences. Contact us Latest posts