Coming in early Q4, Resonate’s Custom Engaged Audiences product will be faster and even more precise. This improved offering releases as a self-serve capability within Resonate Cortex that lets you reach people while they are still deciding by building an audience of people actively engaging with the topics you care about right now, in minutes without leaving the platform.

What’s new this release: a dynamic hands-on build experience

Until now, our team built each Custom Engaged Audience for you from keywords and exclusion lists, and that could take a week or more. Now you build it yourself in Cortex. Start with a plain-English description, review the topics Cortex suggests, and refine the audience as you go. Size and engagement trends update in real time. A full build takes about 30 minutes, and trend data on your topics shows up right away. Now you’ll gain:

• More accurate, higher-intent audiences: Cortex understands the topics and sentiment behind a page, not just its keywords, so you reach more of the right people and fewer of the wrong ones.
• Faster, self-service creation: Describe the audience you want in plain language, and Cortex builds it with you in minutes.
• More complex and precise audiences: Split any Custom Engaged Audience into segments, extend your reach with look-alike modeling, or layer in other Resonate attributes or your own data for deeper insights.
• Plan with more confidence: See an audience size and engagement trend before you commit budget, Set the lookback window to 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days, explore related topics and adjust included topics in real time.

What Custom Engaged Audiences does

Custom Engaged Audiences turns online engagement with any topic into a high-intent audience in minutes. It finds the people engaging on any topic right now, including niche topics no prebuilt segment covers. Every audience comes with insight into their values and motivations, so you can target real interest with the right message to win more of them.

• Convert the intent that's already in motion. Everyone in the audience is actively engaging with the topic, so your impressions land on people ready to decide and you move more of them to act.
• Build an active intent audience as fast as you can name it. Describe the audience in plain language and see its size and trend, so you know it's worth the spend, then put it to work in the same session.
• Know what moves them and where to find them. See what each audience values and where they spend time, and predict what they'll do next. Build niche audiences, reach the people engaging with your competitors and turn more spend into revenue.
• Get more from every audience you build. Split any audience into distinct segments for sharper targeting, expand reach with look-alike modeling, or layer in your data and other insights for better performance.

Use cases

• In-market and lower-funnel intent: Reach people researching a mid-size SUV, a family vacation or a home solar installation this week, before they decide.
• Breaking news and cultural moments: A product launch, a topic spiking in the last 48 hours, a policy change or a viral moment will never reach a survey-based taxonomy in time. Capture the spike while attention is still high.
• Competitive conquesting: Reach people engaging with competitor or adjacent products, track how that engagement shifts and find out what else those audiences care about.
• Niche and emerging interests: Build audiences around interests too specific for any prebuilt segment.
• Political and advocacy: Act on breaking news cycles, emerging issues and local topics. Reach voters and supporters engaging with an issue this week, not last quarter.

How to get access

Self-serve Custom Engaged Audiences will be available as an add-on to your Cortex subscription starting in early Q4 of 2026. To add it, contact your account manager or email resonatesupport@resonate.com.

Frequently asked questions

Already have Custom Engaged Audiences? The audiences we've built for you stay exactly as they are, and our team can still build new ones for you. 

• Will my existing audiences go away or need to be rebuilt? No. Audiences our team built for you stay exactly as they are.
• Will I be moved to self-serve automatically? No. If you want to build your own, a simple contract amendment moves you over. You can also keep your current setup and revisit at renewal.
• Is self-serve included in my Cortex subscription? It's an add-on priced by tier. Each tier includes a set number of audiences per term, and a counter in Cortex shows how many you've used. You can add more capacity if you need it.
• How is the build different from before? Audiences now come from topics instead of keywords, and the build is sentiment-aware, so you don't manage exclusion lists. If you need to avoid certain content for brand safety, build it as its own audience and suppress it at activation.
• How fresh is the data, and does it refresh during my campaign? We collect data daily. Your audience refreshes through the lookback window you choose, then moves to the standard 30-day refresh cycle.
• Where can I activate? Anywhere you activate today: any DSP or social platform, through the standard Cortex activation flow.
• Can I build audiences on sensitive topics? Yes, but they carry a sensitive data flag. You can profile them for research and insights, but you can't activate them.