Audience Data Sessions: Q&A with Start.io

Tell us about yourself and your role at Start.io. 

I'm Ofer Livne, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Start.io. I lead our audiences partnerships, including partners like Eyeota. My focus is bringing our segmentation capabilities and our media together into one story for buyers. With more than 15 years in audience and media, my favorite part is still seeing a partner take our inputs and turn them into a campaign that works.

Tell us about Start.io and what makes your data unique.

Start.io is a mobile-first audience and media platform. Our data is first-party. As we observe the signals directly, our core taxonomy is deterministic, not modeled. If we say someone is a fitness enthusiast or a frequent traveler, it's because we saw it from their mobile device signals. We combine more than 20 signals on the same device, including app ownership, location, device, and carrier, so advertisers get a fuller picture than any single signal can give. It's all consented and built for privacy (GDPR, CCPA, COPPA).

Why did you choose to partner with Eyeota, and what does this partnership unlock for advertisers? 

Eyeota gives us the data reach we couldn't build alone. With one integration, our audiences are available on the platforms advertisers already use, including Google, Amazon DSP, Yahoo DSP, Adobe Ad Cloud, StackAdapt, Zeta, and Basis. For advertisers, that means adding deterministic mobile audiences to a plan without a new contract or onboarding. Eyeota's teams also help buyers find the right Start.io segment, and together we build custom audiences when an off-the-shelf segment isn't the right fit. It's a simple way for buyers to use our data wherever they already buy media.

In which markets or regions can advertisers currently activate your data? 

Our data is global, and advertisers can activate it through Eyeota in markets around the world. The US is our biggest market by far. Outside the US, advertisers use our data every month in the UK, Germany, Singapore, India, Australia, France, and Japan, as well as the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and Hong Kong. In total, Start.io data-powered campaigns through Eyeota in more than 20 countries so far this year. If you're planning a campaign in a market that isn't on this list, reach out to the Eyeota team, and we'll check what we can offer there.

What trends are you seeing in the digital advertising space, and how is Start.io evolving to meet these changes?

Three trends stand out: 1. AI – our segmentation process is fully agentic, leveraging over 100 billion daily mobile signals with a powerful AI engine creating a new level of granularity and accuracy. 2. Curation, where buyers want data and supply packaged together in one deal; and 3. CTV, where advertisers want to reach the same audience on the big screen, not just on the phone. Start.io is building for all three. Our audiences work in curation and PMP deals as well as on the open market, and we offer CTV-enabled segments. Our AI audience builder, Maia, lets buyers describe an audience in plain words and get matching Start.io segments ready to activate.

What’s your advice to advertisers exploring data-driven advertising strategies?

Start with the goal, not the segment. Be clear about who you want to reach and what you want them to do, then pick the data that fits. Ask your data partner how each audience is built: is it observed or modeled, how fresh is it, and how many people will you actually reach once it's live. Test a few audiences against the same goal and let the results decide. My own motto is simple: don't trust, verify and measure.

About Start.io

Start.io is a mobile-first audience and media platform. We build privacy-compliant audiences from first-party data collected through our own SDK and RTB across Android and iOS, reaching more than 2.5 billion monthly active users worldwide. Our deterministic taxonomy of 4,000+ segments covers interests, demographics, location, purchase intent and app behavior, and is built for activation across DSP, curation and PMP workflows. Learn more at https://www.start.io/.