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
Cookies are leaving us, but that doesn’t have to mean performance has to. That’s why Experian is taking the steps needed to future-proof identity in our Graph, including adding Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) from The Trade Desk. Experian currently supports UID2 in our Graph outputs for demand-side platforms (DSPs). UID2 support in our Graph outputs will be available to all approved partners by December 2023. In this blog post, we talk about why cookieless IDs, like UID2, that are coming to market because of cookie deprecation, are important, and how incorporating cookieless IDs into an identity graph can help you prepare for a cookieless future. What are cookieless IDs? Like cookies, cookieless IDs provide you with a comprehensive view of a consumer’s digital activity. Unlike cookies, identity providers produce cookieless IDs, using user-consented data and deterministic and probabilistic data signals (like hashed emails or mobile ad IDs). Cookieless IDs are a newer identifier that allows the advertising industry to maintain our understanding of consumers’ digital actions, helping to ensure we continue to generate smart, data-driven insights, targets, activation strategies, personalized experiences, and measurement and attribution. Why should you incorporate cookieless IDs into an identity graph? Adding cookieless IDs to an identity graph allows for licensees of the graph to: Resolve the universal ID to a consolidated consumer profile and know which other digital IDs tie to the cookieless ID Establish a unified view of the consumer with a privacy-compliant ID Produce data-driven and informed advertising strategies that still drive results, without the use of cookies Experian’s Graph Experian’s Graph is one of the most robust and signal agnostic identity graphs in the market. Experian’s Graph supports most digital IDs, including cookieless IDs, such as ID5, UID2, and Hadron ID. When you license Experian’s Graph, you increase your ability to better understand the different digital IDs that tie to a household or individual. Additionally, with our cookieless ID support, you can continue to understand your consumer and their digital IDs in the cookieless world. Why is it crucial to include UID2 support in Experian's Graph outputs? The Trade Desk is the largest, independent demand-side platform. They’ve created a cookieless ID, UID2, that they hope can power the advertising world to come across the open web. UID2 is an alternative solution to third-party cookies that when utilized in an identity graph, can offer a clearer picture of your consumer, enabling frequency controls and better management, across both digital and connected TV (CTV). Approved DSPs can add UID2s to their Experian Graph, giving them access to one of the more trusted and prominent cookieless IDs in the market today. Additionally, DSPs can use this identifier to decide whether to bid on certain inventory or not, on behalf of their advertiser partner. And, if we hedge our bets, it will only grow in prominence and use. While only available to approved DSPs today for use in the Experian Graph, the forthcoming encrypted UID2 token will provide this capability to the entire ecosystem, which allows us all to speak the same language and operate as efficiently as possible. "We are excited to support UID2, one of the premier IDs to support the future of addressability across the open internet, in the Experian Graph. We continue to see the adoption of UID2 across the demand-side ecosystem, increasing addressability across growing channels like CTV and beyond. I am personally excited to see how this momentum continues to increase over the remainder of 2023 and into 2024."chris feo, svp, sales & partnerships, experian Future-proof your identity strategy with Experian Graph and UID2 We’ve seen the impact that cookies have had on digital advertising and marketing. With the impending third-party cookie deprecation, you will need to adopt alternative cookieless ID solutions such as Unified ID 2.0. Experian is well-positioned to help you navigate this change, offering UID2 support in our Graph outputs for all approved partners by December 2023. Take the right steps now to future-proof your identity strategy and discover lasting success even without cookies. Alongside Experian’s Graph solution, you can achieve resilience in an ever-changing world of digital marketing and advertising. Now is the time to get ready for a cookieless future. Connect with an Experian team member to learn more about our Graph capabilities today. Learn more about Experian's Graph today Latest posts
In this article…How data collaboration is evolving from 2023 to 2024How to create efficient data collaboration strategies We live in a data-driven world, and businesses need effective data collaboration strategies to remain successful. Before you determine your 2023 and 2024 data collaboration options, it’s essential to understand what data collaboration is. In short, it involves sharing and combining data from multiple sources to better understand a customer base and make informed marketing decisions. Read on to learn more about our three-step plan to create new data collaboration strategies, how it’s evolving, and what we do to ensure our solutions help maintain your company’s data privacy. How data collaboration is evolving from 2023 to 2024 Data collaboration strategies continually evolve thanks to changing industry dynamics and new technologies. As we move from 2023 to 2024, we’ll likely see collaboration extending outside businesses, meaning data can be shared with external partnerships in the form of a data ecosystem. A data ecosystem is a platform that combines numerous information points, including packages, algorithms, and cloud-computing services, to allow businesses to store, analyze, and use the data they’ve collected. To ensure you’re ready for 2024 data collaboration, you’ll need to take a forward-thinking approach toward new data strategies. How to create efficient data collaboration strategies Here are our three steps for efficient collaboration to make the most of 2023 data collaboration and prepare for 2024. Identify your collaboration goal What are you hoping to gain from data collaboration? Do you understand the audience you’re trying to target and what you want regarding outcomes? To measure your success, you should set short- and long-term goals surrounding data collaboration in 2023 and 2024. Maximize the value of your data One of the most important reasons to gather data is to discover in-depth insights into your audience and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You’ll be able to identify hidden patterns and pinpoint trends you may not have noticed before. With this information, you can make more strategic marketing decisions to stay competitive in your industry. Resolve digital identities Collaborating on data with trusted partners can help you gain a more complete view of your customers by building comprehensive digital profiles. Resolving digital identities can provide greater insight into online and offline behavior of individual consumers, allowing you to better connect with your target audience and boost brand loyalty. Find an alternative to third-party cookies Digital privacy regulations are getting more strict, which is why it’s so important to find more secure alternatives to third-party cookies. By collaborating on data, you can gather essential insights without relying on cookies. This means you’ll still get the information you want while complying with privacy regulations. Choose the right collaboration partner Before you choose a data collaboration partner, it’s essential to ensure their privacy standards align with yours. How do they collect data and use it ethically and responsibly? At Experian, we are dedicated to protecting consumers and delivering responsible and transparent data practices. We focus on five Global Data Principles — security, accuracy, fairness, transparency, and inclusion — to ensure we treat data carefully and respectfully while boosting economic growth and resilience in the marketing environment. When you partner with us for data collaboration, you can trust that your data is protected in a system built for 2023 data collaboration needs — both known and unknown — while still evolving for 2024 and beyond. Choose a secure environment for collaboration Data collaboration security is vital to safeguard your business and consumers’ information. You can make sure your new data collaboration options are protected in several ways. We’ve outlined three options below. Collaboration in clean rooms Clean rooms are secure, private environments where data is shared and analyzed without exposing the underlying raw data. This ensures that sensitive information remains protected and insights are discovered securely. Experian has vetted clean room partners if this is an option you prefer while still getting industry-leading identity resolution. Collaboration directly Collaborating directly with your partner can be a good option if you have robust security measures. Encryption, access controls, and regular audits are essential to maintain data security in direct collaborations. Collaboration with Experian We excel at meeting our clients where they are and accommodating their technical capabilities and how they manage their data. We offer a secure and compliant environment for data collaboration. Our data collaboration solutions are designed to protect your data while enabling deeper insights. At Experian, we understand the importance of data privacy, and our platform reflects our commitment to safeguarding your information. Enable deeper insights and activation with Experian’s data collaboration solution Data collaboration is crucial in today’s business world, and Experian’s solutions are designed to help you bring together your 2023 and 2024 data collaboration strategies securely and efficiently. With Experian, you can unlock deeper insights, resolve digital identities, and confidently navigate the evolving data privacy landscape. If you’re looking for the right partner to enhance data collaboration to drive growth and innovation in your business, you’ll find a secure environment and the right partner with Experian. Contact us today to get started. Contact us Latest posts
We are excited to announce that we’ve updated our CAPE data with 2020 Census data. This release updates estimates and projections from 2010 and replaces all previous CAPE data attributes. U.S. Census data offers a great opportunity for data enrichment The U.S. Census is conducted every 10 years to determine the number of people living in the U.S. in addition to collecting data on dozens of topics across 130+ surveys and programs. U.S. Census data is already broken out into regional groups and covers 100k+ different geographies: States, counties, places, tribal areas, zip codes, and congressional districts. Block groups are the smallest geographic area for which the Bureau of the Census collects and tabulates data. They are formed by streets, roads, railroads, streams, other bodies of water, and other visible physical and cultural features. What is CAPE? Census Area Projections & Estimates data (CAPE) data from Experian utilizes a proprietary methodology to make the data easy to action on for marketing use cases. Made from U.S Census and Experian consumer data, CAPE data sets are developed at the block group and zip code level and targetable at the household level. CAPE 2020 updates CAPE 2020 uses the 2020 Census data blended with other Experian data to update CAPE’s unique attributes for data enrichment and licensing. Multiple sources are used and data is delivered at a block group level or zip code. Experian provides unique CAPE attributes not available through other sources that provide Census data. These include our Ratio and Percentages attributes, Score Factors/Segments, and Mosaic. CAPE 2020 use cases Our CAPE 2020 data sets enable strategic marketing analysis and decision-making. You can use CAPE 2020 data to understand the differences in the markets you serve as they relate to core demographics, housing attributes, education, income, employment, spending, and more. You can do this to: Find populations that are not typically captured in standard demographics. Cross-reference Census demographics data with other behavioral and shopper data. Understand supply and demand for products sold. Get started with our CAPE 2020 data today If you are using Experian’s CAPE 2010 data, please work with your Experian representative to migrate to CAPE 2020. If you are interested in learning more about our CAPE data, get in touch with us today. Latest posts