Freddie Turner is Managing Director, Chalice AI EMEA and NDA’s returning monthly columnist
Since stepping into my role at Chalice AI, one thing has become obvious: advertisers want growth real, measurable business growth but most of the industry isn’t set up to deliver it. New partnerships, rebrands, and shiny tools come and go, but too often they miss the point.
The brief might say “awareness” or “engagement,” but the objective is usually simpler: sell more, retain better, grow faster.
What’s striking is how easily that gets lost. I’ve sat with planners, buyers, even strategists, and there’s often no clear link between the media plan and the commercial goal.
Are we pushing a new product line? Driving loyalty? Filling a sales funnel? These are the questions that should shape every decision yet they’re rarely the starting point.
The business problem must lead the conversation. Before we talk about formats or data types, we ask: what’s the actual objective? From there, we shape everything else – audience, channel, measurement – with the end goal in mind.
What I love about this approach is that we don’t assume we know best. We ask, we listen and then we model every impression based on its likelihood to achieve that outcome.
That’s the core of what we do at Chalice. We deliver custom models built around each advertiser’s specific goals. Models that score every impression, in any platform, based on its ability to change behaviour and deliver on that objective. We don’t buy media. We don’t own the data. And our models are never shared across advertisers. That independence is critical. It means every brand gets a bespoke intelligence layer that stays focused on what matters: their outcomes.
And this isn’t just about streamlining performance; it’s about redefining relevance. Too often, media activation is built on proxies.
Take a DIY retailer trying to sell screwdrivers. The planning team builds a profile: male, 30 – 45, homeowner, etc. But when it comes to execution, those specific criteria don’t translate neatly across platforms. Suddenly, you’re bidding on broad demographic segments that dozens of other brands are also using. That’s not precision, it’s guesswork.
We flip the traditional model by starting with the brand’s own first-party data, what people are browsing, buying, and engaging with in real time and use it to score every ad opportunity. The result: smarter media buying driven by live performance signals, not assumptions. Platforms might do something similar inside their black boxes, but advertisers are often left in the dark. Chalice, by contrast, believes every brand has the right to see, understand, and learn from predictive models built on their proprietary data.
The more time I spend in this role, the more apparent it becomes: the market is demanding outcomes, not just outputs. Vanity metrics don’t cut it anymore. Marketers want to know if their media investment moved the needle, whether that’s more revenue, more customers or more products sold.
This isn’t about one company owning the solution.
The ecosystem is big, complex, and full of specialists. But what’s missing and what matters is alignment: between planning and activation, between data and decisions, between media partners and marketers.
At Chalice, we’re here to help brands use their own performance signals to make sharper choices, deliver real results to grow meaningfully.
Because while the landscape keeps shifting, the goal doesn’t: growth that’s clear, accountable, and built on outcomes that matter.
