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.
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Originally appeared on MarTech Series Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today's complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers. We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever. This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer. Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed. 2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet. The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising. This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach. 2015-2020: The age of walled gardens From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. 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The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments. Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape. With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer. 2025: The omnichannel imperative Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up. The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable. Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Adapting to the future of identity The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant. 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