Cadent Launches AI-enabled Predictive Audience Builder, Giving Advertisers Direct Control on How Audiences are Actually Constructed

New self-service offering provides media buyers the transparency required to predict new audiences and reduce ad waste with real-time tuning while campaigns are in market.

NEW YORK, May 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cadent, the predictive advertising company, today announced the launch of Predictive Audience Builder, the first self-service tool that lets advertisers build audiences from individual data signals rather than relying on pre-bundled segments. As part of the Cadent Platform, media buyers can now directly select, exclude, and weight specific predictive signals, including geographic visitation, publisher visits, keyword behavior, TV & CTV viewership, household demographics, and thousands more, that go into an audience segment. The result is greater incremental reach across the open web, helping advertisers identify and activate high-value audiences that traditional targeting approaches often miss.

Most audience builders work from a fixed menu: pick an in-market segment, layer on demographic data, and then add on behavioral data. The signals beneath each segment are opaque, and buyers pay for the parts they don't need. Cadent's Predictive Audience Builder inverts the model. Buyers see and choose the signals directly, build a custom predictive model around them, and tune the resulting audience with the same visibility they have over their own first-party data.

As the first platform to offer this level of control within a single workflow, Cadent's Predictive Audience Builder enables advertisers to build unique predictive models and activate high-performance audiences based on what actually drives outcomes. The launch also marks Cadent's expansion of it's broader suite of predictive AI capabilities to help advertisers unlock more effective campaign performance.

Cadent's Predictive Audience Builder arrives against widening scrutiny on programmatic efficiency. Winterberry Group estimated that adtech taxes absorbed between a brand and publisher leave just $0.47 of every advertiser dollar for working media, and the ANA's 2024 Programmatic Transparency Benchmark found that more than half of the delivered programmatic spend never reaches its intended audience. Much of that loss originates upstream, in how audiences are constructed.

Early campaigns built in Predictive Audience Builder have demonstrated the ability to drive significant business outcomes, delivering a 5x improvement in CPA for a leading QSR and a 4.6x behavioral lift for a top beverage brand.

"We know nearly 40% of open web impressions are effectively invisible to traditional ID-based targeting," said Eoin Townsend, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Cadent. "Predictive Audience Builder changes that by combining our industry-leading, independent identity graph with real-time predictive AI. It gives media buyers a 'best-of-both-worlds' approach to reach known audiences and uncover high-value ones beyond IDs. Now advertisers can extend incremental reach across the open web and activate opportunities that would otherwise go unseen."

"We are up against strong competitive spend, so we must be highly strategic in how we reach prospective customers. Cadent's Predictive Audiences has helped us do just that," said Elizabeth Crawford, Marketing and Media Strategist at McCoy's Building Supply. "When we tested them against third-party segments built from our own POS data, Cadent's Predictive Audience outperformed those segments. This allowed us to simplify our approach, reduce unnecessary spend and focus on what's actually driving results."

Predictive Audience Builder is available now within the Cadent Platform. To learn more visit www.cadent.com/platform or to request access, contact Cadent at [email protected].

About Cadent

Every day, Cadent ignites 200 billion connections between brands, publishers, and consumers through our predictive advertising platform. With 22,000 AI-driven models, we orchestrate outcomes on all platforms consumers are on, across all media they consume, and at all stages of their journey. With a transparent, unified platform, we connect directly with hundreds of premium partners to drive measurable advertising outcomes across all screens. Learn more at www.Cadent.com.

SOURCE Cadent