By Brian LaRueToday, digital advertising company CPX Interactive announced its new cookie-free IP targeting system, partnering with audience targeting solutions company Semcasting. According to CPX, the process, leveraged with its reach and Semcasting’s available data, has more than three times the reach of cookie-based targeting and is 77 times more accurate than ZIP code geotargeting.According to CPX CEO Mike Seiman, it’s more transparent and upfront than using cookies, too, in spite the privacy concerns that may come to mind at the mention of IP targeting. “We never target a specific computer or machine,” Seiman said in a recent phone conversation. “We’re targeting a zone.” The users themselves are effectively anonymous, and, said Seiman, “you lose the stigma associated with following the user” via dropping cookies. “We don’t have the browsing data, so we don’t have that element of needing to say we’re not looking at the browsing data,” he explained.Instead, the process looks at, as Seiman put it, “anything licensed” — offline data on public record — and then breaks it down into 5.2 million IP zones and considers it against 120 demographic variables. CPX is able to figure out which zones have higher concentrations of certain demographics, but while it can target as specifically as a building or group of buildings, it doesn’t go so far as identifying who’s sitting behind what computer. Seiman used the example of a pharmaceutical company that would want to reach doctors. “We would know the IP of multiple [doctors'] offices,” Seiman explained, and would be able to target the office, but not each computer inside it separately.Seiman said CPX had been looking for a solution like this for a while, but getting it off the ground came to “selecting the right partner.” The solution had to be scalable, and it had to be fast. “It’s more intricate than hitting a button,” he said. “You need a really scalable service to work with.” It helps, he said, that CPX has 10 years of experience and 90 employees — “things you can’t replicate no matter how much money you throw in into the cookie jar.”According to Seiman, aside from the aforementioned pharmaceutical industry, this kind of targeting has ramifications “for certain [for] the automotive industry,” looking at household areas with a propensity to buy certain varieties and makes of cars. He called the implications for political advertising “huge,” pointing out how voter registration data is considered in building these IP zones.