Programmatic media specialist MiQ today announced the launch of MiQ Sigma, a new AI-powered tool which it says will help unify the fragmented programmatic ecosystem. MiQ says that Sigma, which CEO and co-founder Gurman Hundal describes as “the culmination of everything we’ve built over the last 15 years”, enables advertisers to quickly draw insights and run or tweak campaigns across a range of partners, enabling them to take an “agnostic and unbiased approach” to programmatic buying.
From audience intelligence to campaign execution
MiQ outlined three key features of MiQ Sigma which it says help achieve this aim.
The first is Sigma Intelligence, which draws insights across the pool of data sources which MiQ has access to. The company says Sigma unites over 300 data feeds covering 700 trillion consumer signals, including the watching, browsing, and buying behaviours of over 1.7 billion audience profiles globally. The idea is that by uniting data from across these sources, presenting it clearly to advertisers and highlighting key trends, marketers will be better able to spot opportunities to more efficiently reach relevant audiences.
The second feature is a trading agent, which is underpinned by Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, and trained on MiQ’s historical trading data. Through a chatbot interface, marketers can make optimisations across multiple demand-side platform (DSP) partners, which are then automatically executed. A marketer, for example, could ask to see how a campaign is performing, and then prompt the trading agent to increase frequency, which would then be executed across DSP partners by MiQ Sigma.
The third feature outlined by the company is the addition of AI-generated personas, which are custom built for marketers based on natural language prompts. Once a persona is created, Sigma then identifies various targeting segments available through DSP partners which can be used to reach that audience.
MiQ says that these features together help unify planning, buying, and measurement in programmatic advertising. An advertiser might, for example, find a relevant audience it wants to target through Sigma Intelligence, then immediately build an AI persona based on this insight, and find relevant targeting segments from supply partners. Sigma will then use MiQ’s historical data to create a campaign which the marketer can then tweak before setting it live.
“From day one, MiQ has believed in the power of agnostic partnerships, deep data intelligence, and human expertise to drive results,” said MiQ’s CEO Gurman Hundal. “MiQ Sigma is the next evolution of that vision—enhancing core strengths with powerful new technology. In a fragmented and increasingly complex ecosystem, Sigma makes everything we do faster, smarter, and more connected—it’s what powers MiQ to drive market-leading outcomes, and gives our teams and clients a serious edge in a rapidly changing market.”
Keeping marketers’ hands on the wheel
MiQ isn’t the only business touting AI’s potential to simplify advertising. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken several times in recent weeks about his ambition for AI to do pretty much all of the legwork for businesses running ads on Facebook and Instagram — marketers simply state their objectives and hand over their bank details.
MiQ Sigma isn’t going down that route. The idea looks to be to unify datasets and draw out insights which would be hard or impossible to do manually, and to simplify the execution of campaigns across buying platforms, but without taking over completely. Sigma will make recommendations to marketers, but it’s still up to the advertisers themselves to choose whether to act on those recommendations.
“MiQ Sigma represents a breakthrough for our programmatic strategy and the brands we serve,” said Clive Record, global president of partnerships and solutions at agency group Dentsu. “What makes it so unique isn’t just that it unifies our view of audiences and platforms – it’s how it converts that unified view into smarter decisions across every aspect of campaign management. MiQ Sigma is a genuine step-change that empowers our agency to deliver what truly matters—impactful business outcomes for the world’s leading brands.”
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