Accretive Audiences at Narrative

How Accretive thinks about signal

When we built Accretive Audiences, we started with a question: what would a brand or agency need to know to confidently put one of our audiences into a media plan?

An audience name only gets you so far. A buyer should understand what qualifies someone for inclusion, what the audience is designed to represent, and why it makes sense for the campaign. 

Our experience in out-of-home shaped that perspective. Understanding where people go and which businesses they engage with provides critical context for reaching them. That context has value across all the channels brands plan and buy media.

Different objectives call for different audience strategies. A retailer looking to reach shoppers at competing stores has a different brief from an automotive brand looking for prospective buyers. The methodological approach should reflect that difference.

That is the thinking behind Accretive Audiences: use the evidence appropriate to the audience, be clear about what it tells us, and make the result practical for a buyer to use.

What we built

Accretive Audiences brings together more than 500 audiences, across 20 verticals, fully privacy-compliant, spanning demographics, shopping and dining behavior, purchase intent, life stages, interests, and political and civic audiences.  

Our approach draws on real-world visitation, demographics, geo-political signal, in-market intent, and composite blends. The methodology follows the audience we are trying to build and the campaign objective it needs to serve.  Every segment ties back to 130M+ households and 20M+ points of interest. The design is infrastructure-grade audience data, not single-signal models.

The value of combining signals is additional consumer relevance. Demographic context can help refine a behavioral audience. Observed visitation can inform broader category interest. Each input should contribute something meaningful to the audience definition.

The catalog spans automotive, retail, food and beverage, travel, finance and insurance, health and wellness, sports, entertainment, and other categories. Across that range, our standard is consistent: a clear audience definition, an appropriate methodology, and a practical path to activation.

And because every segment is built the same rigorous way regardless of vertical, it's ready to activate anywhere a buyer needs it: out-of-home, programmatic display, CTV, social, direct mail… whatever and wherever our clients need.

Why Narrative

Building the audience is one part of the job. Making it accessible to buyers is another.

Every custom feed and additional integration creates work between an audience being ready and a buyer being able to use it. We wanted a distribution partner that could help make our catalog easier to discover and access.

That is the role Narrative plays. Its marketplace and distribution capabilities help connect Accretive Audiences with buyers and their activation workflows. Accretive brings the audience definitions and the work behind them; Narrative helps make those audiences available for use.

For a media buyer, that connection matters. The audience should make sense for the brief, and there should be a practical path to getting it into the campaign.

What's next

We are building our audience business around a straightforward expectation: buyers should understand what an audience represents and why it is relevant to their objective.

As the catalog grows, we want to give brands and agencies more useful choices, supported by clear definitions and accessible distribution.

If you are planning a campaign, start with the brief: who you need to reach, what makes them relevant, and where you want to activate. Explore Accretive Audiences through TTD or Narrative, or speak with our team about the audience options that fit.

Ready to go?

Talk to Narrative about adding Accretive's data to your strategy.

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