Consumer-packaged goods (CPG) advertisers increasingly demand a unique precision in audience targeting.  With thousands of SKUs, nuanced consumer loyalties, and wide-reaching distribution, advertisers deserve a custom approach to their audience strategy using the right data. 

Building custom CPG audiences enables advertisers to factor in brand and product data along with demographic, lifestyle and more, building custom audiences are the way to go. A custom approach may feel overwhelming, with the challenge of building custom CPG audience quickly enough to meet campaign scale, KPI’s and timing. 

Alliant’s quick turnaround custom CPG audiences are a great solution. In a media environment where speed matters as much as strategy, Alliant’s unique end-to-end process is designed to move you from audience idea to campaign launch with maximum efficiency. It’s faster and easier than you expect, building a custom CPG audience in just five simple steps.   

Step 1: Kick Off the Process 

Reach out to your Alliant account team and request a custom CPG audience. Don’t have a contact yet – reach out to the Alliant Audience Help Desk. To build the best audience possible, share as much information on the campaign including creative, flights dates, target audience and more. The must have details include:  

• Your campaign goals and KPIs   

• The CPG brand(s) or product categories you’re focused on 

• Any other target attributes that are important such as demographics or lifestyle   

Audience in action: Let’s say you’re building a Summer 2025 campaign to promote Unilever’s Dove+ Men’s Care Soap among active young men. You might ask for an audience that combines males aged 18–34 with high propensities for fitness, exercise, and personal care purchasing habits. This custom audience needs to be pushed to the Amazon DSP in May so the campaign can begin driving product demand and sales. 

Step 2: Guiding the Right Strategy 

The Alliant Client Success team seamlessly takes over to develop a custom audience strategy designed specifically to meet your goals. These client success experts manage the custom audience creation process from end to end. That kind of strategic specificity is our sweet spot. The team is an expert on Alliant data elements and the product and category specifics of the Alliant CPG data set.  They work to better understand the audience needs, building the perfect seed audience to then power the model.  

Audience in action: Client Success may follow up with a few questions such as, are you interested in competitive brand audiences, or adjacent men’s care products? This strategic partnership helps build in other similar brands or product categories to support scale, or even provide new audience segments to test in the campaign. Together you might settle on including Old Spice buyers, but not Axe buyers, as that is another Unilever brand you don’t want to cannibalize.   

Step 3: Data Science Magic 

Once the seed data is selected by Client Success, the team pushes the request through to a custom modeling process that matches the data to the Alliant DataHub, builds and scores the model. The model will identify a larger universe of consumers who share similar attributes to those in the seed audience – ultimately an audience that delivers on your campaign and brand goals.  Alliant’s Data Science team oversees the automated processes to ensure a quality audiences is deployed in record time.  

Audience in action: With multiple brands and some adjacent product categories like men’s hair care and body lotion, the team ultimately creates five different seeds, deploying five different models and audiences.  This variety does not add processing time, but instead enables more control and testing, enabling advertisers to measure success of each deployed audience separately, while also achieving scale.  

Step 4: Review the Results 

Once the audience has been modeled and scored, we’ll deliver back availability counts and deployment details for review. You’ll know exactly what you’re working with before it goes live—no black box, no guesswork. 

This review step is designed to keep you in control, with total visibility and flexibility to adjust if needed.   

Step 5: Push to Launch

Once approved, the audience is ready to activate on over 400 platforms and exchanges. Your final file is delivered to your preferred location (or any supported platform of your choice), and the campaign fun begins. Whether you’re activating on Amazon DSP to The Trade Desk, or META to TikTok , Alliant has you covered with clean, validated, and ready to perform data. 

From kickoff to activation, Alliant is built to deliver custom CPG audiences with efficiency and targeting strategy in mind. This is why thousands of brands and agencies choose Alliant for their audience targeting needs.  

So, there’s no sense in waiting on building your custom CPG audience. Contact Alliant today!