Audience targeting has become a major part of the online marketing landscape, but one persistent problem is the outliers -- those Internet audiences that are difficult to classify and thus hard to reach.

That's why ChoiceStream recently banded together with advertising agency Hill Holliday to develop CRUNCH Active Audience, a new solution aimed at targeting those hard-to-qualify audiences based on their shared attitudes, psychographic profiles or special affinities for certain brands or products. CRUNCH Active Audience works by using a clean, in-banner poll to ask customers to share information about themselves, such as specific traits or attitudes, indicating their personal affinity for a brand's product or message.

CRUNCH then takes the responses and uses ChoiceStream's network of consumer data to create a Super Profile of the brand's ideal consumer prospect. The solution can even provide clients with the data necessary to custom-assemble a scalable audience based on behavior and performance matching.

This is currently the only audience-targeting solution to take advantage of ChoiceStream's proprietary network of individuals, though it also utilizes third-party data and real-time ad response technology to predict where, when and, of course, who will respond to a specific brand's advertising. So far, Hill Holliday's clients have seen as much as twice the consumer engagement with their campaigns when CRUNCH has been leveraged.