Alliant has long argued that “the future of targeting isn’t audience or contextual; it’s quality,” and challenged the ad tech industry to look beyond the usual binary debates. For years, marketers have swung between two schools of thought: audience-based targeting powered by identifiers and contextual targeting powered by content. While both have value, neither can deliver sustainable performance on its own. True advertising effectiveness depends on the quality of the underlying data, models, and partnerships behind every impression.

From Alliant’s point of view, the industry must outline a vision for a marketplace built not on volume or convenience, but on verified, transparent, and privacy-respectful data. There is a growing need for accountability in a post-cookie world, where ID loss, signal degradation, and regulatory pressure make quality the most valuable currency in advertising. Data must be consented. Context must be interpreted with nuance. AI must be applied responsibly. Advertisers will succeed not by finding more data, but by finding better data.

Audience and contextual strategies shouldn’t compete; they should complement each other. A quality-first approach allows the two to work in concert: predictive models trained on verified behavioral and transactional data, combined with high-fidelity contextual signals, can achieve both scale and precision without compromising privacy or relevance. The end game isn’t about choosing sides, but about raising standards.

That future is now coming into focus.

Alliant’s newly announced partnership with Proximic by Comscore demonstrates what a quality-first targeting ecosystem looks like in practice.

Through this partnership, 500 of Alliant’s predictive audience segments (spanning Automotive, CPG, Pets, Retail, Political, and Travel) will now be available within the Proximic by Comscore Data Partner Network. Built on verified transactional data and advanced modeling, these segments offer marketers with deterministic accuracy and transparent lineage. Within Proximic’s AI-powered predictive framework, they can now be activated across ID-free inventory at massive scale, extending the reach of valuable audiences outside of traditional identifiers.

The collaboration unites Alliant’s trusted audience data with Proximic’s leading contextual and natural language processing engine, which predicts high-propensity content environments based on AI and consented panels. The result: privacy-forward predictive audiences that deliver the precision of behavioral targeting with the reach of an ID-free solution.

Now, with the addition of Alliant’s 500 new segments, marketers can expect even greater coverage, including political and ethnicity-centric segments that address unmet demand across leading programmatic platforms.

For agencies and brands, this partnership brings our vision into focus. Quality data, transparency, and AI-driven contextual understanding can coexist to power responsible, effective advertising. It also underscores a truth that’s becoming increasingly clear: success in the privacy-first era depends not just on innovation, but on collaboration. The future of targeting will be defined by those who partner with purpose and the data leaders, technology innovators, and advertisers committed to making quality the cornerstone of modern marketing.