Agency clients want more than impressions, clicks and campaign performance. They want to know whether they're reaching the right people, what motivates those people to respond and how to find more customers like them.
The largest agency holding companies are investing heavily in data, AI and technology to answer those questions. Publicis Groupe, for example, reported 5% organic net revenue growth in the third quarter of 2026 while continuing to position its data and AI capabilities as competitive advantages.
But independent and mid-sized agencies don't necessarily have the resources to build their own consumer data infrastructure, hire data scientists or conduct ongoing consumer research.
The good news? They don't have to.
How Can Agencies Offer More Advanced Audience Targeting?
Agencies can expand their audience targeting capabilities by partnering with audience intelligence providers that specialize in consumer research, predictive modeling and audience development. These partnerships allow agencies to offer more sophisticated targeting and analytical services while retaining control of their client relationships, strategy and media execution.
Most agencies already have access to sophisticated targeting and optimization tools through the advertising platforms they use. But there's an opportunity to offer clients more than media planning and campaign execution. That might mean understanding what motivates consumers to choose one brand over another, identifying prospective customers before they're actively shopping or building custom audiences using existing CRM data.
It could also mean answering questions that go beyond media placement. Who are our best opportunities for growth? What makes them different from our current customers? Where are they most likely to be reached?
But all of that sounds like more work. Because it is.
Consumer research, predictive modeling and audience development require time, specialized expertise and access to data that agencies may not have internally. And building those capabilities from scratch isn't always practical, especially when client needs vary from one campaign to the next. An audience intelligence partner gives agencies access to those capabilities without having to build and maintain everything themselves.
What Can Audience Intelligence Add to an Agency's Services?
Advanced audience intelligence combines consumer data, survey research and predictive modeling to identify audiences based on behaviors, interests, attitudes and likely intentions. The difference is in how those audiences are developed.
Traditional targeting often relies on demographic characteristics, browsing activity or past purchases. Those signals can be useful, but they don't always explain why someone makes a decision or what they're likely to do next. Survey research adds another layer by capturing consumer attitudes, motivations, preferences and intentions that aren't always visible through behavioral data alone. When combined with consumer data and predictive modeling, those insights can help identify larger audiences of people who share similar characteristics.
For agencies, that means being able to offer clients more than a list of people who fit a demographic profile. It creates opportunities to identify consumers based on what matters to them and what may influence their next decision.
At Causeway Solutions, we help agencies expand the types of insights and targeting options they offer across different industries. For example:
Healthcare marketing: An agency working with a hospital or healthcare system can identify consumers modeled as prioritizing convenience, quality of care or compassionate care when choosing a healthcare provider. These insights can help inform audience development and messaging.
Customer acquisition: A retailer wants to find new customers, not continue advertising to people who have already purchased. By matching existing customers to a broader consumer file, an agency can develop look-alike audiences to identify additional prospects while suppressing known customers from acquisition campaigns. Modeled consumer interests, behaviors and purchase intentions can also help identify potential customers before they're actively shopping.
Media planning: Two consumers who fit the same target audience may have very different media habits. Layering streaming, linear television and social media consumption models onto an audience can help agencies understand where different segments are more likely to be reached.
These are examples of how audience intelligence can expand an agency's capabilities beyond campaign execution, without requiring it to conduct all the underlying research or build the models itself.
Why Not Just Build Audience Intelligence In-House?
Building proprietary audience models involves more than purchasing data or subscribing to an analytics tool. Agencies need reliable data sources, research capabilities, specialized analysts and the infrastructure to maintain and activate those audiences.
Those needs also change from client to client. A healthcare campaign may require research into patient preferences, while a retail client may need customer profiling and acquisition models. Maintaining all those capabilities internally requires ongoing investment, even when certain resources are only needed for individual projects.
An audience intelligence partnership offers another option: access to established research, modeled audiences and custom analytical support when needed, without the overhead of building an entire data operation.
How Does an Audience Partnership Work?
An audience intelligence partnership doesn't have to change how an agency manages its clients, and it doesn't have to start with the agency.
Some agencies partner directly with audience intelligence providers to expand what they can offer their clients. In other cases, a brand brings in an audience intelligence partner to work alongside its existing agency, helping both teams better understand their customers, identify growth opportunities and improve targeting.
Either way, the roles are complementary. The agency continues managing strategy, media planning and execution, while the audience intelligence partner provides the consumer research, data, predictive models and technical support behind it.
Depending on the client's needs, that might mean using an existing modeled audience, developing a custom segment or building a look-alike model from first-party customer data. Those audiences can then be made available for activation across supported advertising channels, including programmatic, connected TV and social media, subject to each platform's matching and activation capabilities.
For agencies working across multiple clients, a partnership can also create opportunities to consolidate audience purchasing. Depending on the partnership structure, agencies may qualify for volume-based rebates as they activate audiences across campaigns. The result is a more flexible way to offer sophisticated audience targeting without building an entire data operation internally.
What to Look for in an Audience Intelligence Partner?
The right partnership should provide more than a catalog of audience segments. Agencies should understand how the audiences are developed, what research and data support them, how frequently they're updated and where they can be activated.
It's also worth considering whether a partner can offer audience strategy support, custom modeling, audience suppression, first-party data integration and consumer profiling when a client's needs go beyond an existing audience. Most importantly, the partnership should complement the agency's capabilities rather than compete with them.
At Causeway Solutions, that's how we approach partnerships. Whether we're working directly with an agency or alongside a brand's existing agency, our role is to provide the consumer research, predictive modeling, ready-to-activate audiences and analytical support that help teams make more informed targeting decisions.
The goal isn't to turn every agency or marketing team into a data company. It's to give them access to the intelligence they need to reach the right people.
Looking to improve your audience targeting? Whether you're an agency expanding your capabilities or a brand looking to get more from your existing media strategy, let's talk about how Causeway can help.
Source: Publicis Groupe, Third Quarter 2026 Results, October 13, 2026.