Intent Data is Changing the Game for Media Organizations.

Article by Roberta Muller, MACMA Board Member

In this MACMA Sponsor Spotlight, Roberta Muller introduces our members to Bombora. In this insightful interview, Cara Gilmartin, Director, Insights & Enablement, shares how Bombora's Data Co-op helps publishers compete on quality, not scale and discusses AI, personalization and privacy trends will shape the future for media organizations.

RM: Welcome to MACMA, the Media Audience and Content Marketing Association. We are excited to bring you our Sponsor Spotlight, where we shed light on companies that are redefining media and marketing.

What sets MACMA apart is our commitment to equipping media professionals with the tools and resources they need to succeed. Today, I’m delighted to introduce Bombora, a recognized pioneer in B2B Intent data and audience intelligence.

I’m Roberta Muller and joining me today to explore Bombora’s impact is Cara Gilmartin, Senior Director, Insights & Enablement. Let’s get started with some terrific Q&A.

RM: What makes your solution different from others in the market, especially for teams focused on audience development, marketing, or digital operations?

CG: Our core differentiator is the Bombora Data Co-op, a truly one-of-a-kind collective built over the last decade. It consists of leading B2B publishers, brands, and premium data providers—all contributing research behavior and Intent signals that reflect the full spectrum of B2B internet consumption. This continuous, shared contribution ensures our data is not static, but a dynamic, growing, and truly representative view of the professional B2B world.

For audience development and digital operations teams, the Co-op's scale and diversity allow us to provide superior audience segmentation and site personalization, driving higher engagement and first-party data capture. For sales & marketing teams, our proprietary methodologies transform this collective knowledge into actionable insights, clearly identifying which accounts are actively researching products or services. This enables highly targeted campaign activation, precise content strategy, and a significant improvement in campaign ROI compared to solutions relying on closed, limited, or self-reported data sources.

RM: What advice would you give a small-to-mid-size media organization looking to compete with larger players?

CG: Right now, small-to-mid-size media organizations have a great opportunity to stand out and demonstrate the value of their niche, deeply engaged audiences. With the rise of generative AI capturing top-of-funnel traffic, the value of pageviews across the publishing industry changes from quantity to quality. The strategic imperative is to leverage agility to own a high-value niche and use data to provide verifiable audience intelligence.

This means proving that your readership is not just visiting your site but actively demonstrating high engagement as well as Intent buying signals. This data-driven focus allows you to reposition your value proposition to advertisers. Instead of competing on scale, you compete on the quality and purchase propensity of your audience. Bombora’s mission is to help publishers with this critical shift by providing B2B Intent data, allowing them to identify the specific businesses actively researching relevant topics within their audience.

RM: How do you see AI, personalization, or privacy trends shaping the next year or two for media organizations?

CG: AI is leading to an explosion of content creation, flooding the market and making it harder for original, high-quality content to stand out—while at the same time, affecting the volume of traffic for publishers.

To combat this, personalization will be key. This is shifting the focus beyond simply optimizing for clicks and views toward maximizing subscriber acquisition and loyalty. Tailoring the user experience through content, formats, and calls-to-action will be the way to earn and sustain engagement, driven by an urgent need for media organizations to refine and hone robust first-party data strategies.

Privacy remains essential to all of this as well, driven partly by regulatory pressure (like GDPR, CCPA), and serves as a catalyst for consumer-first privacy policies. Users expect transparency and are more willing to exchange data for clear value, meaning privacy now serves as the foundation for building trust and enabling valuable personalization.

At Bombora, we see AI, personalization, and privacy as accelerants for the B2B ecosystem’s Intent-driven monetization—our core value proposition. The Co-op's foundation of consent-driven B2B publisher data is inherently resilient, and we continue to grow a dense network of high-quality, known B2B behavioral data. We’re committed to ensuring audiences remain addressable and valuable to advertisers in privacy-first environments.

RM: Thanks for sharing these insights with us, Cara. We appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you at our next event so our members can get to know you and Bombora better.

Learn more about Bombora.