Acxiom today made its Geo-Based audience segments available inside The Trade Desk's third-party data marketplace across the UK and Germany, adding location-derived consumer targeting to one of the most active programmatic buying platforms in Europe.

What changed and what it means

Acxiom, the data and technology company that operates as part of Omnicom and Omnicom Media, announced on June 10, 2026, that its Geo-Based audience solution is now live in The Trade Desk's data marketplace for buyers operating in both markets. The move extends an existing relationship between the two companies - Acxiom's broader InfoBase data was already accessible through The Trade Desk - but this specific product type, built around geographic signals, is entering the marketplace for the first time.

The distinction between a geo-based audience and a standard demographic or behavioral segment is technical but matters in practice. Geo-based audiences are constructed from observed patterns at real-world locations rather than from declared attributes or modeled interests. The underlying data draws on verifiable consumer behavior, not survey responses or probabilistic inference alone. When a brand needs to reach consumers who frequent certain types of physical environments - retail stores, healthcare facilities, travel hubs - that granularity has historically been hard to represent in a programmatic campaign. Acxiom's entry point into The Trade Desk's marketplace for this product class gives buyers in the UK and Germany a new tool to close that gap.

According to Acxiom, the foundational data asset behind this integration is InfoBase, which the company describes as drawing on one of the most extensive consumer data repositories globally. InfoBase is built from verifiable consumer behavior and provides insight into consumer demographics, lifestyles, and interests. It has previously been deployed across other platforms, including Google Cloud's Analytics Hub and, following a June 2025 partnership announcement, in collaboration with Snowflake on AI marketing infrastructure. The geo extension specifically reflects Acxiom's positioning around place-based consumer patterns rather than purely digital signals.

How the integration works technically

Advertisers accessing The Trade Desk's Kokai platform in the UK and Germany can now select Acxiom's Geo-Based segments as a targeting layer when building campaigns. The mechanism is the same as any other third-party data provider in The Trade Desk's marketplace: segments appear as available targeting options during campaign setup, can be applied across ad formats and device types, and are priced through the platform's standard data cost structures.

The Trade Desk's marketplace has been under active development since September 2025, when the company launched Audience Unlimited, an AI-powered overhaul of how third-party data segments are priced and deployed. That system introduced tiered pricing at 3.3% and 4.4% of impression costs in Control Mode, and bundled data access at no incremental cost inside Performance Mode. Audience Unlimited uses AI scoring to evaluate segment relevance across thousands of curated options from hundreds of providers - a structural change that affects how any new entrant like Acxiom's Geo-Based product is surfaced and selected by buyers.

The practical implication is that Acxiom's audiences are not simply added to a static list. They enter an ecosystem where AI tooling influences how prominently segments are recommended for specific campaigns. Buyers using Performance Mode will see Acxiom's geo segments evaluated alongside every other option. Buyers using Control Mode can still apply them directly with the standard tiered fee applying on top of media cost.

According to Daniel Todorovic, Director Alliances EMEA at Acxiom: "In addition to our existing integration, our Geo-Based audiences are now available in The Trade Desk's data marketplace, offering marketers a bridge between authentic consumer insight and programmatic media buying. Our strength has always been our masterful curation of data and our ability to reach consumers with a high level of precision and detail in the real world. This integration empowers advertisers on The Trade Desk to activate truly relevant audiences with confidence, supported by the privacy-compliant practices that define Acxiom."

The privacy architecture is not incidental here. Both the UK and Germany operate under distinct regulatory environments - the UK retains GDPR-equivalent obligations under UK GDPR post-Brexit, while Germany applies GDPR along with stricter interpretations from its supervisory authorities. Any data product made available in those markets through a DSP must be structured to comply with consent requirements under those frameworks, including the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework for programmatic transactions. Acxiom says InfoBase is built with privacy compliance as a core characteristic, not an add-on.

The Trade Desk's data marketplace in context

The Acxiom announcement is the latest in a sequence of data marketplace additions that The Trade Desk has executed over roughly nine months. The February 25, 2026 partnership with AudienceProject brought socio-demographic audience segments and independent measurement into the marketplace, with the audience segments launching specifically in the UK and Germany - the same two markets covered by today's Acxiom integration. That geographic overlap is not coincidental. Germany is Europe's largest advertising market by total investment, and the UK represents a mature programmatic environment where demand-side platform adoption among major agencies is high.

Before AudienceProject, Intuit brought SMB MediaLabs audiences to The Trade Desk in November 2025, giving buyers access to first-party data derived from QuickBooks, Mailchimp, TurboTax, and Credit Karma. That product addressed the small and mid-market business audience, a segment that had historically been difficult to reach accurately at scale. In January 2026, Comscore added AI-powered audio contextual targeting on The Trade Desk, extending measurement and targeting into streaming audio and podcasts. Each addition addresses a distinct targeting gap.

In May 2026, Truthset integrated its Data Rated Audiences with Unified ID 2.0 within The Trade Desk's marketplace, providing independently scored demographic segments designed to reduce ad waste in connected TV environments. Truthset estimated more than $7 billion in ad waste results directly from inaccurate audience data in CTV - a figure that illustrates why data quality validation has become a selling point rather than a given.

Acxiom's geo product sits in a different category from all of these. Socio-demographic segments describe who consumers are. SMB segments describe what size of organization they work within. Geo-based segments describe where consumers go and what that says about their behavior patterns. The combination of all three types, now available within the same marketplace on the same DSP, gives buyers in the UK and Germany a multi-layered targeting toolkit without needing to go outside The Trade Desk's platform to find the pieces.

Paula Bacariza Perez on the commercial logic

Paula Bacariza Perez, General Manager of Data and Strategy EMEA at The Trade Desk, commented on the commercial rationale: "When rich audience insight meets the scale of The Trade Desk's omnichannel platform, advertisers can plan and activate with confidence - improving efficiency and making advertising spend work harder. Underpinned by an audience-first strategy, our data marketplace and Acxiom's insights help brands identify and connect with their most valuable existing - and potential - customers. The result is precise advertising that moves beyond guesswork to deliver stronger performance and measurable impact across the open internet."

That framing - moving beyond guesswork - echoes a persistent challenge in programmatic advertising. When The Trade Desk reported full-year 2025 revenue of $2.896 billion, with growth decelerating to 18% year over year, CEO Jeff Green described the data marketplace as still underdeveloped relative to its potential. Green attributed that underperformance specifically to cost complexity: "There has been a massive underutilization of third-party data and retail data in particular since the advent of programmatic about 20 years ago. The cost has been really complicated for marketers, so generally they don't use it." Audience Unlimited was his proposed fix. Adding providers with clear value propositions - like Acxiom's geo specificity - strengthens that product's practical utility.

What Acxiom's position as Omnicom's data infrastructure means

Acxiom's role inside the broader media ecosystem has become more structured since Omnicom's public positioning of the company as a connected data and identity foundation for its group. As part of Omnicom Media, Acxiom functions as the data layer that unifies, connects, and prepares signals for AI-driven marketing decisions across Omnicom's agencies and clients. This matters for the Trade Desk integration in a concrete way: Omnicom agencies using The Trade Desk to buy media can now access Acxiom's Geo-Based segments through a single workflow inside the DSP, without needing to orchestrate a separate data licensing arrangement.

This vertical integration of data supply and media buying has been a structural trend. Acxiom partnered with Magnite in August 2025 to enable sell-side data activation - a separate track from DSP-side access. That arrangement made Magnite the first programmatic partner for sell-side activation of Acxiom data, applying audience segments at the point of inventory availability on the supply side rather than the demand side. Buy-side and sell-side access to the same underlying data asset creates consistency in targeting across the transaction, which is operationally simpler for advertisers managing multi-publisher campaigns.

Acxiom has locations in the U.S., UK, Germany, China, Poland, and Mexico. The choice to launch the geo product in the UK and Germany through The Trade Desk's marketplace aligns with where the company already has established operational infrastructure - the same rationale AudienceProject cited for its own UK and Germany launch on the same platform in February 2026.

EMEA identity and data infrastructure as a system

The Trade Desk's EMEA data strategy has also developed on the identity side in parallel. On June 1, 2026, The Trade Desk and Utiq announced a partnership integrating telco-powered, consent-based identity signals into the platform's EMEA identity solutions portfolio. Utiq is a joint venture of Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, and Vodafone, and its identity signals include netID in Germany - making that country a focus of both the identity and data infrastructure expansion that The Trade Desk has been executing in 2026.

The geo-based audience signal from Acxiom and the telco-based identity signal from Utiq are complementary rather than redundant. Identity signals establish which device or user is being addressed. Audience signals establish what that user's observed behavior patterns suggest about their likely interests or purchase intent. Together, they support a campaign structure where the who and the what are defined through independent data pipelines. Neither depends on third-party cookie infrastructure.

That architecture is increasingly relevant in Germany in particular. German supervisory authorities have historically taken stricter positions on data processing than many other European markets. The shift toward consent-based, first-party-anchored, and verifiable data sources reflects regulatory pressure as much as commercial preference. Acxiom's description of InfoBase as privacy-compliant and built on verifiable consumer behavior addresses that pressure directly, though advertisers will still need to assess their own compliance obligations when activating any third-party segment in those markets.

In March 2026, The Trade Desk launched OpenTTD, a unified portal giving data providers, publishers, and brands structured API access to its programmatic advertising ecosystem. The portal organizes access under role-based tracks, including a dedicated path for data providers to make audiences and measurement solutions available across campaign stages. Acxiom's Geo-Based product, now live in the marketplace, represents exactly the kind of third-party data integration OpenTTD was designed to encourage and facilitate.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Acxiom, part of Omnicom and Omnicom Media, and The Trade Desk, an independent demand-side platform listed on NASDAQ. Named spokespeople are Daniel Todorovic, Director Alliances EMEA at Acxiom, and Paula Bacariza Perez, General Manager of Data and Strategy EMEA at The Trade Desk.

What: Acxiom's Geo-Based audience segments, derived from its InfoBase consumer data asset, are now live in The Trade Desk's third-party data marketplace. The integration allows advertisers to activate location-derived audience segments - built on verifiable consumer behavior at real-world locations - directly within the Kokai buying platform. It extends an existing relationship between the two companies by adding a new product category to what was already available.

When: The announcement was made on June 10, 2026. The integration is described as already live, meaning buyers in the UK and Germany can activate the segments immediately.

Where: The integration is available specifically in The Trade Desk's data marketplace for buyers operating in the UK and Germany. Acxiom has operational infrastructure in both markets and is headquartered in the United States. The Trade Desk is headquartered in Ventura, California.

Why: Advertisers in the UK and Germany now have access to geo-derived audience data inside a DSP they already use for programmatic buying, without needing to source that data through a separate arrangement. The move adds a place-based targeting layer to a marketplace that has been expanding its third-party data options since September 2025, and sits within a broader EMEA programmatic data and identity infrastructure build at The Trade Desk that includes the AudienceProject partnership and the Utiq identity integration from earlier in 2026. For Acxiom, the integration extends InfoBase's distribution footprint and reinforces the company's position as a data infrastructure layer for Omnicom agencies buying through The Trade Desk.