Bombora this week announced that Proximic by Comscore's Predictive Audiences now includes 300 new contextual audiences built based on Bombora's proprietary business-to-business data. The partnership, announced on January 22, 2026, combines Bombora's data assets with Proximic's predictive artificial intelligence technology to enable sophisticated contextual targeting mapped to industry, job function, professional group, and install data attributes.

The segments address a persistent challenge in digital advertising: reaching business decision-makers through content-based targeting rather than cookie-dependent tracking. Advertisers can activate these segments through The Trade Desk's Contextual Marketplace or via portable Deal IDs through Microsoft Monetize, enabling access to major programmatic platforms including DV360, Yahoo DSP, and Adobe.

"Our partnership with Proximic by Comscore is another demonstration of our commitment to giving advertisers seamless access to Bombora's proprietary B2B data to enable sophisticated advertising strategies," said Mike Burton, Co-Founder and EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Bombora. "Uniting our unique data assets with Proximic's predictive technology, empowers brands to reach their ideal professional audiences using a diversity of strategies, including contextual editorial placements, at scale."

The integration marks a significant infrastructure development for business-to-business advertisers seeking privacy-compliant targeting approaches. Unlike behavioral tracking methods that rely on third-party cookies or device identifiers, contextual targeting analyzes content characteristics to place advertisements alongside relevant material. This methodology has gained adoption as privacy regulations limit persistent identifiers across digital advertising environments.

According to research from Comscore released in January 2025, 54% of mobile impressions lack identifier coverage, while 36% of desktop impressions operate without traditional tracking capabilities. In response to these limitations, 41% of marketers prioritize contextual targeting as their primary solution, slightly outpacing first-party data strategies at 40%.

Technical implementation

Proximic by Comscore's Predictive Audiences technology processes Bombora's proprietary B2B data through artificial intelligence models that predict which contextual environments align with specific business attributes. The system enables advertisers to target professionals based on editorial content consumption patterns rather than individual user tracking.

The 300 segments cover essential business-to-business attributes. Industry-specific segments enable targeting by vertical markets including technology, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and professional services. Job function segments reach decision-makers across roles including IT management, procurement, finance, marketing, and operations. Professional group segments target audiences by organizational level, company size, and decision-making authority. Install data segments identify companies based on their technology infrastructure and software deployments.

These targeting parameters operate through contextual analysis of content environments. When business decision-makers consume editorial content related to specific industries or professional topics, the system places advertisements within those media environments. This approach extends reach beyond traditional account-based marketing lists while maintaining relevance to business audiences.

Jessica Trainor, Head of Partnerships at Proximic by Comscore, emphasized the specialized nature of these segments: "Combining our AI-powered predictive signals with Bombora's market-leading data and robust multi-identifier infrastructure, creates highly specialized segments that help maximize addressability and drive results in a complex digital landscape."

The technical architecture leverages Bombora's Data Co-op infrastructure, which connects thousands of leading publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers. Bombora's Company Surge Intent data forms a foundational ingredient of many segments, providing signals about accounts actively researching products, services, or topics relevant to specific business categories.

Programmatic activation

The segments activate through multiple programmatic pathways. The Trade Desk's Contextual Marketplace provides direct access for advertisers operating on the platform. This integration connects Bombora's B2B audience data with The Trade Desk's measurement capabilities and supply path optimization tools, enabling campaigns across connected television, display, audio, and digital out-of-home inventory.

Microsoft Monetize, formerly known as Xandr Monetize and originally built as AppNexus SSP, provides the second activation pathway through portable Deal IDs. Microsoft Monetize supplies access to open internet ad inventory across more than 100 countries where Microsoft maintains video and native supply. The platform processes all inventory and transaction types with deal packages that can be activated across multiple demand-side platforms.

Yahoo DSP and Adobe Advertising Cloud represent additional activation endpoints through Deal ID distribution. DV360 users access the segments through the same Deal ID infrastructure, enabling Google's programmatic buying platform to activate Bombora-powered contextual audiences across campaigns. This multi-platform availability addresses a critical requirement for B2B marketers: unified audience targeting across fragmented programmatic ecosystems.

The activation model differs fundamentally from traditional third-party data deployments. Rather than applying audience segments directly to individual impressions through cookie matching, the contextual approach targets inventory based on content characteristics. Bombora's B2B data informs which contextual environments correlate with specific business audiences, but individual users remain anonymous throughout the transaction.

Market context

The partnership arrives as business-to-business targeting sophistication increases across programmatic advertising. Multiple infrastructure developments throughout 2025 established foundations for advanced B2B audience activation. Bombora launched Curated Ecosystem Audiences in October 2025, partnering with Crunchbase, Definitive Healthcare, G2, and HG Insights to transform proprietary B2B data signals into addressable audience segments.

Bombora audiences reached Reddit's 116 million daily users in December 2025, making the company's company-level audience targeting capabilities available on the social platform. That integration enabled marketers to activate consent-driven digital audiences to reach business decision-makers across Reddit's 100,000+ communities, addressing growing demand for B2B targeting on platforms where professionals actively engage in research and peer consultation.

Contextual targeting has transitioned from experimental layer to baseline control signal across programmatic advertising operations. Comscore's 2026 State of Programmatic Report, released January 20, 2026, revealed that 74% of marketers plan to maintain or increase contextual targeting usage, demonstrating steady-state adoption. Three-quarters of respondents indicated that curated marketplaces, private marketplaces, or deal ID-based premium supply will be important or very important for their 2026 programmatic strategies.

The shift toward contextual approaches addresses privacy regulation challenges. Third-party cookie deprecation has accelerated adoption of targeting solutions that don't rely on persistent user identifiers. Amazon's technical paper released in February 2025 documented how advanced artificial intelligence techniques maintain ad relevance without compromising user privacy, demonstrating that contextual targeting enhanced by modern machine learning can effectively replace cookie-based tracking while improving key performance metrics.

Proximic by Comscore has systematically expanded its programmatic infrastructure throughout 2025. The company launched content-level audio contextual targeting on The Trade Desk platform in January 2026, providing AI-powered classification across streaming inventory and 4.6 million podcasts. Comscore-Certified Deal IDs integrated with Magnite in May 2025, automating access to premium inventory based on Comscore's content measurement rankings.

Business implications

The announcement reflects the central role Bombora plays in unlocking value across the business-to-business advertising ecosystem. The company characterizes itself as the true B2B data pioneer, connecting the ecosystem through a one-of-a-kind Data Co-op structure. Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence models, Bombora creates holistic views of company research behavior enabling brands, agencies, and publishers to identify, understand, and reach prospects and customers.

Bombora provides multiple solution categories beyond digital audiences. Company Surge Intent data enables marketers to unify campaigns across CRM, ABM platform, and martech stack tools, empowering sales teams to engage accounts at optimal moments with targeted messages. Identity resolution and enrichment capabilities identify accounts visiting websites, enabling targeted nurture campaigns and pipeline progression measurement. Campaign measurement solutions quantify marketing impact across channels.

The Proximic partnership extends Bombora's reach across programmatic channels while maintaining the company's emphasis on proprietary data collection methodologies. Bombora's Data Co-op consists of thousands of leading publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers who share data signals exclusively with Bombora through persistent privacy-first, consent-driven protocols. This cooperative structure differentiates Bombora from data providers relying on inference or third-party data sources.

For Proximic by Comscore, the partnership strengthens competitive positioning in contextual targeting markets. The company competes against multiple providers including Oracle Advertising, which offers video-level contextual intelligence for connected television through partnerships with The Trade Desk. Independent measurement companies including Integral Ad Science have demonstrated contextual targeting performance advantages, with campaigns during Super Bowl LVIII achieving 102% increased return on investment compared to overall averages.

The integration addresses advertiser demand for specialized targeting capabilities that balance precision with scale. Business-to-business audiences historically presented challenges for programmatic activation due to fragmented data sources and limited scale compared to consumer targeting. Bombora's proprietary data collection through its publisher cooperative provides reach unavailable from single-source providers, while Proximic's predictive technology expands addressability beyond direct identifier matches.

Competitive landscape

The partnership announcement occurs amid significant consolidation in business-to-business audience data and activation. Channel99 introduced functionality in December 2025 that automatically creates and activates B2B audiences across major advertising platforms including LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and YouTube. That AI-powered decision engine enables marketers to build target account lists and distribute them to multiple channels through single-click activation.

Intuit's SMB MediaLabs audiences arrived on The Trade Desk platform in November 2025, providing advertisers with direct access to first-party small and mid-market business audience segments. Small businesses constitute 99% of companies in the United States according to U.S. Small Business Administration data, making verified SMB audience data valuable despite historically fragmented third-party data limiting accurate targeting.

Comscore debuted an AI-powered Data Partner Network in September 2025, enabling third-party data providers including AnalyticsIQ, Circana, Dynata, Eyeota, L2 Data, and TransUnion to transform ID-based datasets into scalable, privacy-first audiences using Proximic by Comscore's proprietary AI predictive technology. That network functions as a connective layer between data providers and marketplace needs, ensuring datasets remain addressable, privacy-aligned, and scalable.

The programmatic advertising infrastructure supporting these audiences has experienced substantial development. The Trade Desk announced Audience Unlimited in September 2025, introducing AI-powered scoring to evaluate data segments by relevance to specific campaigns. The system analyzes thousands of curated segments from hundreds of third-party data providers, addressing long-standing challenges in the data marketplace where cost concerns and difficulty determining which data sources deliver effective results discouraged third-party data deployment.

Microsoft's decision to discontinue Microsoft Invest DSP by February 28, 2026, while maintaining Microsoft Monetize on the supply side, reshaped demand-side platform dynamics. The platform, originally built as AppNexus and known for transparency in programmatic advertising, charged an average of just 8.5% to sellers according to former CEO Brian O'Kelley statements. Microsoft Monetize continues operations and recently joined Amazon's Certified Supply Exchange program in October 2025.

Privacy and measurement

The contextual targeting approach addresses privacy requirements without sacrificing campaign effectiveness. European privacy regulations including GDPR establish strict requirements for personal data processing, limiting behavioral tracking approaches that rely on persistent identifiers. Contextual targeting analyzes content characteristics rather than individual user behavior, providing compliance-friendly targeting methodologies.

Bombora's consent-driven data collection protocols align with privacy frameworks. The Data Co-op structure ensures publishers and data providers explicitly share information with Bombora through formal agreements establishing permitted uses. This cooperative model contrasts with data collection approaches that rely on inference from publicly available information or data acquired through secondary purchases.

Campaign measurement capabilities extend beyond impression delivery metrics. B2beacon, Bombora's proprietary digital campaign measurement solution, provides granular, descriptive reach and engagement metrics at the account, buying group, and persona level. The system delivers visibility needed to evaluate impact and optimize campaigns through unparalleled match rates, addressing a fundamental limitation in business-to-business campaign measurement where attribution across extended sales cycles presents persistent challenges.

The Proximic partnership introduces measurement capabilities specific to contextual placements. Advertisers can evaluate which content environments deliver optimal engagement from target business audiences, informing future media planning decisions. This feedback loop enables continuous optimization of contextual targeting parameters based on demonstrated performance rather than assumed content-audience correlations.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Bombora, the B2B data pioneer, partnered with Proximic by Comscore, a division of Comscore Inc. focused on contextual targeting and privacy-forward programmatic solutions. Mike Burton serves as Co-Founder and EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Bombora, while Jessica Trainor serves as Head of Partnerships at Proximic by Comscore.

What: The partnership created 300 new contextual audience segments combining Bombora's proprietary B2B data with Proximic by Comscore's AI-powered predictive technology. The segments enable sophisticated contextual targeting mapped to industry, job function, professional group, and install data attributes, accessible through The Trade Desk's Contextual Marketplace or portable Deal IDs through Microsoft Monetize, enabling activation across DV360, Yahoo DSP, and Adobe platforms.

When: Bombora announced the partnership on January 22, 2026, building on infrastructure developments throughout 2025 including Bombora's Curated Ecosystem Audiences launch in October and Proximic by Comscore's audio contextual targeting integration with The Trade Desk in January 2026.

Where: The segments activate across major programmatic platforms including The Trade Desk's Contextual Marketplace and Microsoft Monetize supply-side platform, reaching inventory across connected television, display, audio, and digital channels. Bombora maintains headquarters in New York, while the Data Co-op structure connects thousands of publishers, brand websites, and premium data providers globally.

Why: The partnership addresses B2B marketers' need for privacy-compliant targeting approaches as 54% of mobile impressions lack identifier coverage and 36% of desktop impressions operate without traditional tracking capabilities. Contextual targeting provides effective alternative to cookie-dependent behavioral targeting while enabling advertisers to reach business decision-makers through content-based placements at scale, with 41% of marketers prioritizing contextual targeting as their primary solution and 74% planning to maintain or increase usage in 2026.

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