Interests & Hobbies

Bring Identity to Life with Interests, Habits, and Real-World Signals

We’ve all seen it. Clean rows of email addresses, postal codes, perhaps a name. A whisper of intent. A trace of value. But in those moments when data becomes action, when that whisper becomes a signal, we’re not just marketing to a file, we’re trying to meet a person where they are. Or better yet, where they’re already headed.

Interest data isn’t another layer of demographic decoration. It’s a reframing. A way to ask not just who your audience is, but what moves them.

We map interests and inferred behaviors — rich, specific, purchase-driven indicators — onto email records with precision, scale, and recency. The result? You don’t just know who someone is. You know what they care about. And that changes everything.

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The Stagnation Problem

When Demographics Fail to Differentiate

Let’s be candid: segmentation is broken in more places than we care to admit.

You’ve got gender, age, ZIP, and maybe a modeled income. But how often does that really sharpen your marketing? When everything you know about two different people leads you to put them in the same campaign, the same journey, the same CRM segment… you’re not building relationships. You’re just reducing risk.

Interests add a dimensional layer. A signal of mindset, lifestyle, and emotional priming that standard demographic buckets simply don’t provide. They don’t replace traditional models; they displace their limitations.

And that’s where performance starts to bend.

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Behavior, Not Just Belief

We don’t deal in surveys, wishful affinities, or vague social profiles. The signals we append are grounded in observable behaviors—not declarations. We tie individual-level data to:

• Real-world purchases (online and offline)
• Subscription activity (magazines, news, curated content)
• Lifestyle commitments (healthy eating, arts & crafts, high-end brands)
• Category-specific commerce (automotive, cooking, travel)

This allows marketers to shift from relying on generalized personas to deploying interest-backed targeting that reflects the actual rhythms of a consumer’s life.

Because someone who says they’re into travel isn’t the same as someone who books flights. And someone who subscribes to The Economist doesn’t behave like someone skimming headlines on social media.

This isn’t guesswork. It’s grounded differentiation.

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Signals That Shape Strategy

So what can these signals do when properly activated? When appended to your first-party data, interests and hobbies can help you:

• Design high-impact journeys based on emotional relevance, not assumed persona fit
• Suppress waste by avoiding message fatigue in uninterested segments
• Build lookalike models using rich psychographic cores, not just cookie-cutter demo inputs
• Re-score leads by introducing behavioral nuance into your funnel logic
• Prioritize creative testing with data-informed themes and category hooks
• Identify white space where legacy audience definitions have stopped delivering

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What This Data Actually Changes

You already have data. You probably have too much of it. What you need is perspective. Clarity on what data actually matters when it comes to shifting a result. Imagine:

• Being able to build new product affinity models based on buyers of other niche categories.
• Knowing which segment of your CRM are health-conscious brand loyalists and which are value-seeking automotive buyers.
• Retargeting anonymous visitors not just with cart reminders, but based on the lifestyle content they consume.
• Enhancing personalization with intent-backed nuance, instead of demographic placeholders.

That kind of lift doesn’t come from more data. It comes from the right data, brought to life.

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The Precision Behind the Story

We’ve built this capability on top of one of the most robust identity networks in the industry. Our signals are updated continuously, fed by billions of monthly activity inputs, tied to real-world outcomes.

• Individual-level resolution: mapped to emails, household clusters, or hashed identifiers
• Billions of data points monthly: ensuring freshness and reducing drift
• Real purchase behavior: not inferred social likes or surveys
• Scalable: supporting batch, API, or dynamic audience activation
• Privacy-forward: fully compliant, hashed when needed, built for today’s targeting environments

Our job is to make data more usable, more explainable, and ultimately, more powerful. Because when you understand what someone loves, what they aspire to, what they choose in their off-hours—that’s when your marketing starts to feel like memory, not interruption.

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The New Baseline for Relevance

In a world where personalization is increasingly table stakes, and “knowing your customer” is both a mandate and a cliché, there’s a dangerous temptation to settle for what’s easy. Demographics are easy. Location is easy. Past purchase is easier still.

But relevance — real, felt relevance — comes from knowing what motivates someone when they’re not being marketed to. And that means digging into interests, habits, rituals, and spend.

That’s what Interests and Hobbies gives you. Not just more data, but a more human data layer.

It’s not about finding new channels. It’s about making the ones you already use — email, direct mail, digital, display — finally worth the attention they ask for.