Digital Envoy today made data from its NetAcuity IP intelligence product available on The Trade Desk, giving advertisers audience segments built on the internet service provider, mobile carrier or organization behind a connection rather than on location alone. According to Digital Envoy, the integration is live globally, including in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and in Asia-Pacific, and the audiences can be activated across the open internet, connected TV included.

The segments also sit inside Audience Unlimited, The Trade Desk's bundled data product, where they can be combined with data from other providers. Neither company disclosed a price, the number of segments, the countries or operators covered, match rates or any accuracy measurement. The announcement, distributed through Business Wire from Atlanta at 8:03 AM Eastern Daylight Time, names technology and telecommunications brands as the main intended users and ties the timing to the fourth-quarter holiday season.

In Short

Every device that goes online is handed an internet address by a company such as a broadband provider or a mobile network, and Digital Envoy sells a database that works out which company, and roughly which place, sits behind each address. Through The Trade Desk, advertisers can now aim ads at people according to the phone carrier or internet provider they use, or the organization whose network they are on, so a mobile operator can, for example, show a switching offer to a rival's customers. The release gives no figures on how big these groups are, how often the guesses are right or what the data costs, so those questions remain open.

What the two companies announced

The release carries the headline "The Trade Desk Integrates Digital Envoy's NetAcuity Data to Power Audience Targeting Beyond Geography" and a subhead stating that segments built on "ISP, mobile carrier, and organization-level signals launch globally across the open internet and CTV." Although The Trade Desk's name leads the headline, Digital Envoy issued the announcement. The Trade Desk's part in it is a single quote from Jerome Eymery, its vice president of business development.

According to Digital Envoy, NetAcuity data "is now available on The Trade Desk platform, enabling advertisers to build more granular audiences for their digital advertising campaigns." The company says the partnership gives advertisers additional signals, "including internet service provider (ISP) and mobile carrier data, to create ID-based audiences for activation across the open internet, including connected TV (CTV)."

Digital Envoy describes NetAcuity as an "IP intelligence solution that incorporates multiple data sources and real-world device signals to map IP addresses to geographic locations and deliver location, network, and contextual intelligence for advertising, cybersecurity, and compliance use cases." What the "real-world device signals" are, and where they come from, the release does not say.

The product sits at the core of IP geolocation, the practice of inferring where a device is from the address it uses to reach the internet. Until now, NetAcuity's value to advertisers has mostly been the "where." Today's integration sells the "who connects it": the network operator and, in some cases, the organization that holds the address.

Three signals beyond location

Internet service providers and mobile carriers

An IP address names no place and no person. It is a routing label, assigned in blocks to the networks that carry traffic. PPC Land's explainer describes how vendors build their maps from registry allocation records, hostname patterns, latency measurements and customer distribution tables that service providers supply directly. Working out which operator holds a block is a different and narrower question from placing an address in a specific household, and that distinction matters when judging what the new segments can and cannot do.

Operator information already travels through programmatic advertising, though unevenly. As PPC Land's explainer on carrier data sets out, the OpenRTB device object defines a carrier field as a string, and a second, numeric field, mccmnc, joins the mobile country code and network code. That second value reflects the SIM card, not the network in use, so roaming has to be inferred. Apple deprecated its CTCarrier class in iOS 16, and since iOS 16.4 it returns static values for apps built with newer SDKs. A browser has no equivalent call at all. A web request can therefore only carry an operator name inferred elsewhere, and the IP address is the most plausible source. NetAcuity sells exactly that inference.

The example Digital Envoy chose is a telecom one. "A telco running a customer-switching campaign, for example, can use these signals to deliver creative that better aligns with a consumer's needs and preference," the release states. In practice, that means a carrier can show one message to people who appear to be on a competitor's network and another to its own subscribers.

Eymery framed the same idea around moments of change. "One of the most valuable moments in telecom is when consumers are making a change - whether that's upgrading their phone, switching carriers, or bundling their internet service," he said. "These moments represent significant opportunities for advertisers to connect with consumers. By bringing Digital Envoy's network and carrier-level data to our platform, we're helping advertisers find and reach relevant audiences with greater precision across the open internet."

Several practical questions go unanswered. The release does not say how the data treats mobile virtual network operators, which can route their subscribers' traffic through a host operator's network. Nor does it say how a household's broadband provider is told apart from the mobile network a phone uses away from home Wi-Fi.

Organization-level signals

What counts as an organization-level signal? The release is less precise here than anywhere else. According to Digital Envoy, advertisers "particularly in the technology and telecommunications sectors" can build segments that "incorporate organization-level signals, supporting campaigns tailored to where consumers are in their relationship with a provider." Charlie Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of LocID and International at Digital Envoy, gave the business-to-business version: "a technology brand reaching the organizations that matter most."

Matching an address to a company underpins much of account-based marketing in programmatic buying, and it depends on the full address. PPC Land reported in June that Google restored the IP octet that powers B2B account targeting in AdSense. By default, AdSense bid requests send only the first three of an IPv4 address's four numeric groups, which widens the signal from one host to a block of 256 addresses. A control launched on June 1, 2026 lets publishers share the full address, but it is off by default and excludes non-personalized ads, limited ads served without valid consent and Restricted Data Processing requests. How organization-level matching performs on truncated addresses, the release does not discuss.

Johnson tied the whole package to a wider problem. "Advertisers are looking for greater accuracy in how they identify and reach audiences, particularly as signal availability and quality continue to fragment," he said. "The incorporation of NetAcuity data unlocks powerful new audience strategies that simply weren't possible with geography alone: a carrier reaching consumers based on their current provider, a technology brand reaching the organizations that matter most - now available globally on The Trade Desk."

From an address to an "ID-based audience"

One phrase in the release carries more weight than its length suggests. Digital Envoy says the signals are used "to create ID-based audiences." The Trade Desk buys against identifiers, so IP-derived attributes have to be attached to something the platform can target, whether a device, a household or one of the identity frameworks the platform supports. The release does not say which identifier is used, how often the link between an address and an ID is refreshed, or what share of a given network's subscribers ends up in a segment.

Johnson's job title offers a hint, nothing more. LocID is Digital Envoy's identity business, and other Digital Envoy releases on Business Wire cover it. One describes LocID Graph, an identity graph product that Digital Envoy says "enables advertisers to maintain accurate, persistent identity graphs even as IP addresses change," built on what it calls "a privacy-first, location-based foundation." Another covers a LocID Native App on Snowflake. Today's announcement does not state whether LocID is the bridge between NetAcuity's network data and the IDs The Trade Desk activates.

Shared addresses complicate the picture. The global shortage of IPv4 addresses has pushed operators toward carrier-grade network address translation, which places many subscribers behind one public address. In January 2026, Digital Element, the Digital Envoy division that sells NetAcuity, launched a NAT Detector feature that flags addresses likely to represent multiple subscribers or endpoints. For operator-level targeting, a shared address still belongs to a single network, so the problem bites less than it does for household targeting. For anything finer, it matters a great deal.

Why EMEA and APAC are singled out

According to the release, the segments are available "including across EMEA and APAC, where limited IP visibility has historically presented challenges for precise audience targeting." It adds that "for advertisers in those regions, the integration provides access to more granular audience data." What "limited IP visibility" refers to is not explained: thinner IP databases, privacy restrictions on using addresses, or something else.

The European backdrop is restrictive. Google itself only began IP-based measurement and personalization in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland on or shortly after August 3, 2026, a change Google announced to publishers in June while citing on-device processing, trusted execution environments and secure multi-party computation. The release does not describe the legal basis or consent mechanism behind the NetAcuity segments in Europe.

That contrasts with the other telco-derived signal on the same platform. On June 1, 2026, The Trade Desk integrated Utiq's telco identity signals across EMEA. Utiq, a joint venture of Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone, converts mobile network signals into pseudonymous identifiers only after users give explicit marketing consent, and reported about 70 million users across six markets as of November 2025. Utiq's data comes from the operators themselves. NetAcuity's operator attributes come from an independent vendor's mapping of addresses, and no operator is party to today's announcement.

Commercially, the regions matter to The Trade Desk. International revenue was about 17% of the total in the second quarter of 2026, up from 14% a year earlier, and EMEA and APAC each grew more than 50% year over year in CTV, according to PPC Land's coverage of the company's second-quarter results.

Audience Unlimited and the cost question

The NetAcuity segments are "also available through The Trade Desk's Audience Unlimited offering, giving advertisers greater flexibility to combine Digital Envoy's network and carrier-level insights with other third-party data," according to the release. The word "also" suggests a separate route exists, but the release does not say whether the data is sold a la carte or at what rate.

Audience Unlimited dates to September 2025, when The Trade Desk launched its data marketplace overhaul with AI scoring. The company said at the time that advertisers using third-party data typically spent close to 20% of their media costs on it. Its answer was two pricing modes: Control Mode, with tiered rates of 3.3% and 4.4% of impression costs, and Performance Mode, in which Audience Unlimited is included at no additional cost. An AI model scores segments for relevance to each campaign. Traditional per-segment pricing remained available, and the product was scheduled to reach all users in early 2026.

By August, the product had not reached that point. When The Trade Desk reported second-quarter results on August 6, 2026, management said Audience Unlimited was in the hands of very few customers and was moving to open beta, with Adsquare location data added in June. Whether a buyer in Performance Mode can see when NetAcuity segments are used, and how they are weighted against other data, is not covered in today's release.

What the accuracy record shows

IP-derived data has a mixed public record, and the studies PPC Land has covered concern location and household matching rather than operator identification. A 2017 study presented at the Internet Measurement Conference, summarized in PPC Land's IP geolocation explainer, tested four databases against known router locations and found country-level accuracy of 89.4% for NetAcuity, against 77.5% to 78.6% for the free MaxMind files. City-level accuracy reached about 73% at best.

Household-level results are weaker. A Truthset study for CIMM and Go Addressable, analyzing nearly one billion IP records from six providers, found IP-to-postal linkages accurate 13% of the time and IP-to-email linkages 16% of the time. Providers agreed on the same IP-to-household link only 6.4% of the time. FreeWheel cited those findings in February to warn that IP-based targeting can miss 87% of households, and said IP addresses account for 17% of audience targeting on its own platform. In July, an Adstra study found IP-based CTV targeting fails 3 in 4 times: only 23% of residential IP addresses reached their intended geographic target, and IP addresses stayed consistent month to month 57% of the time, against 71% for device-level CTV identifiers.

None of these tests measured whether a vendor correctly names the ISP or carrier behind an address, which is the core of today's product. That may be the easier problem. But no published figure exists for it in the release, and Digital Envoy offers none for the organization-level signals either. For CTV, where the household is usually the unit being bought, the earlier findings apply more directly.

The Trade Desk's year so far

The integration arrives during a difficult stretch for the platform. Second-quarter revenue rose 3% to $715 million, and guidance of at least $650 million for the third quarter implied a decline of roughly 12%, which would be the first year-over-year revenue drop in the company's history. On September 4, The Trade Desk cut about 575 jobs, roughly 15% of staff.

Once iOS 27 shipped on September 14, Safari on affected Apple devices stopped loading The Trade Desk's ad domain, adsrvr.org, along with UIDAPI.com, which is tied to Unified ID 2.0. On October 5, Apple asked The Trade Desk to test an iOS 27.2 beta build, though the WebKit ticket remained open, PPC Land reported on October 6.

Against that background, the 2026 data deals form a pattern: consented telco signals from Utiq and Adsquare location data in June, and now network-level attributes inferred from IP addresses. Each widens what the platform can sell without third-party cookies or email-based identifiers, and each carries its own consent, coverage and accuracy questions. Today's release does not mention Apple devices or Safari.

Digital Envoy and NetAcuity

Digital Envoy says it "introduced the world to IP-based geolocation in 1999." PPC Land's explainer places the company among the field's early commercial vendors, alongside Quova, when MaxMind was founded in 2002. The NetAcuity database is sold through Digital Element, which a January 2026 Business Wire release describes as a division of Digital Envoy, Inc., headquartered in Atlanta. The only website today's release links to is Digital Element's.

The product has been extended before. In September 2024, Digital Element launched an IP address segmentation tool for Australia, an Alternate Area Database that divides the country's 26 million people into 61,000 Statistical Area Level 1 zones instead of roughly 3,300 postcodes, with Germany's PLZ8 and France's IRIS areas planned.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Targeting by mobile carrier is not new in itself. Reddit, for instance, introduced carrier targeting in February 2022 for the US, the UK and Canada. What has changed is who controls the signal. Operators have been building their own advertising businesses: on October 5, 2026, Vistar Media announced T-Mobile audience segments for DOOH available only through Vistar's DSP, while Utiq sells consented operator signals in Europe. Today's integration takes a different route, offering operator attributes inferred from addresses by an independent vendor, across markets, inside an independent DSP.

For telecom marketers, that means switching campaigns can be aimed at a rival's subscribers on the open internet and CTV without a deal with the rival operator or a walled garden. For business-to-business marketers, the organization-level signals offer an account-based option inside The Trade Desk, subject to the same address-truncation limits that already shape IP-to-company matching. For publishers, the integration adds another reason buyers value the full IP address in bid requests, a point Google's June AdSense control already made explicit.

Accuracy remains the open question. Operator- and organization-level inference sits between country-level geolocation, tested with reasonable results, and household matching, tested and found wanting. Neither company has published coverage or validation figures for it.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Digital Envoy, the Atlanta-based IP geolocation company whose Digital Element division sells the NetAcuity database, and The Trade Desk, the independent demand-side platform. The release quotes Charlie Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of LocID and International at Digital Envoy, and Jerome Eymery, vice president of business development at The Trade Desk. Technology and telecommunications advertisers are the named target users.

What: NetAcuity data is now available on The Trade Desk, letting advertisers build ID-based audience segments from internet service provider, mobile carrier and organization-level signals inferred from IP addresses, for activation across the open internet and connected TV. The segments are also available inside Audience Unlimited. No pricing, segment counts, coverage, match rates or accuracy figures were disclosed.

When: Announced today, with the integration live at launch and positioned for the fourth-quarter holiday season.

Where: Globally, with the release singling out EMEA and APAC, regions it says have faced "limited IP visibility." The announcement was datelined Atlanta and distributed through Business Wire.

Why: According to the companies, signal availability and quality are fragmenting, and network-level data allows targeting that location alone cannot, such as a carrier reaching a rival's customers during a switching campaign or a technology brand reaching specific organizations. For The Trade Desk, the deal adds another non-cookie data source in a year of slowing revenue, job cuts and a Safari domain block.