The era of paying for intent that never converts is ending. New performance data released today by full-service, independent agency The Shipyard and behavioral AI company Yobi reveals that moving from standard programmatic segments to predictive behavioral modeling has shown stronger engagement and more efficient conversion outcomes than standard third-party behavioral audiences.
As traditional reach metrics lose their value and third-party tracking disappears, this multi-brand program, covering tourism, retail, and higher education, has centered its strategy on high-precision behavioral modeling rather than outdated proxy-based tracking like cookies. Since launching in 2025, the partnership has scaled to 26 campaigns for 17 brands, proving in head-to-head testing that Yobi-targeted inventory can deliver an average of 3.7x higher engagement and up to 40% better cost efficiency than standard inventory.
Most programmatic tools struggle to tell the difference between a window shopper and a buyer. By leveraging Yobi’s proprietary dataset, which connects 5.5 trillion transaction signals and 50 million active TVs, The Shipyard can now identify the exact moment a consumer is ready to make a purchase.
“The industry has spent a decade optimizing for clicks, but a click isn’t a customer,” said Max Snow, CEO and Cofounder of Yobi. “Our foundational model doesn’t just look for people who look like buyers, it uses over 700 billion parameters to identify the specific behavioral patterns that precede a purchase decision. Partnering with The Shipyard allows us to prove that when you eliminate the noise of casual browsing, the efficiency gains are immediate and massive.”
Yobi partnered with The Shipyard because of the agency’s reputation as a premier independent, performance-first media partner with the strategic discipline to test, validate, and scale new solutions responsibly for clients. The partnership is now expanding into new verticals for 2026, moving Yobi’s data capabilities into the earliest stages of campaign strategy.
“Cookies were always a proxy, not the customer. What matters now is identifying signals that tell us when someone is actually closer to a decision, and Yobi gives us a way to do that. That allows us to be more intentional with spend and build audience strategy around real-time behavior instead of broad demographic assumptions, or static third-party segments,” said Amanda Wallingford, Programmatic Director at The Shipyard. “The value is in being able to act on what consumers are showing us now, which creates a more relevant and effective path to performance.”
Unlike traditional identity graphs that rely on static PII (Personally Identifiable Information), Yobi’s foundational model is built on 700 billion non-public parameters. At training time, behavioral signals are transformed into model embeddings that capture activity patterns while preserving privacy, allowing for high-intent targeting without ever storing raw, identity-level records.
About Yobi:
Yobi was founded to advance both commercial innovation and the scientific study of human behavior. Its team includes world-class machine learning experts who have built cutting-edge recommendation systems and AI products at Amazon, Uber, Twitter, Meta, and more.
To learn more about Yobi, visit http://www.yobi.ai/.
About The Shipyard:
Headquartered in Columbus, OH and San Diego, CA, The Shipyard brings together talented individuals and organizations across the creative, communications, media, and digital landscape to grow brands that audiences can’t help but love. It is uniquely designed and organized to Engineer Brand Love through a unifying approach of paid, owned, and earned channels. The Shipyard brands include Fahlgren Mortine, an award-winning integrated communications agency; TURNER, a communications agency dedicated to travel, tourism, and active lifestyle brands; and TinyWins, a global digital studio bringing world-class capabilities in strategy, creative, design, and AI-driven brand innovation.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260507343410/en/
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