AI's Open Web Gambit: madSense and Symitri Target Walled Garden Dominance

NEW YORK, NY – January 09, 2026 – In a significant move aimed at reshaping the digital advertising landscape, AI firm madSense and performance technology company Symitri have announced a strategic partnership, unveiling what they claim is the industry's first native integration of an Optimized Language Model (OLM) with a real-time AI audience discovery engine. The collaboration embeds Symitri's PRISM AI directly into madSense's madBuy Demand-Side Platform (DSP), creating a unified system designed to solve the advertising world's most pressing challenges: the death of the third-party cookie and the demand for uncompromised user privacy.

The partnership makes a bold promise: to deliver the precision and performance of closed ecosystems, or 'walled gardens' like Google and Meta, on the vast, untamed territory of the open internet. Early pilot results with a major pharmaceutical advertiser reportedly doubled the brand's addressable audience, a figure that has sent ripples of curiosity through the ad-tech community.

A New Playbook for the Open Web?

For years, advertisers have faced a growing dilemma. The tools they relied on for tracking and targeting—namely third-party cookies—have been systematically dismantled by browser developers and privacy regulations. This has left nearly half of the open internet opaque, making it increasingly difficult to reach relevant audiences at scale. In response, many advertising dollars have flowed into the walled gardens, which leverage massive stores of first-party data to offer unparalleled targeting capabilities, albeit with limited transparency and data portability.

The madSense-Symitri integration is positioned as a direct counter-offensive. By fusing Symitri's real-time audience discovery capabilities with madSense's AI-powered media buying platform, the companies aim to restore addressability without relying on outdated identifiers.

"This is not modeled reach or theoretical lift," said Jeff White, Co-CEO of madSense, in the official announcement. "By natively integrating PRISM AI into our DSP, we're enabling real-time audience discovery and activation to function as one system—unlocking scale, precision and impact that simply hasn't been possible on the open internet until now. It's one of the rare cases in which 1 plus 1 equals 3."

The key to this synergy is the native integration, which eliminates the need for advertisers to manage separate contracts or complex technical setups. Instead, they can activate the advanced audience capabilities directly within the madBuy DSP, allowing for what the companies call "closed-loop optimization," where campaign insights continuously refine audience discovery in real time.

"This partnership restores something the industry has been losing: true addressability on the open internet," stated Bill Wheaton, CEO and Chairman of Symitri. "By combining PRISM AI's real-time discovery with madSense's DSP intelligence, we're delivering walled-garden-level performance without sacrificing scale, transparency, or privacy."

Decoding the AI Engine

The partnership's claims rest on a sophisticated technological foundation that combines two distinct but complementary forms of artificial intelligence. On one side is madSense's OLM-powered platform. Unlike general-purpose language models, madSense describes its OLMs as a core component of an 'Intelligence Operating System,' which uses custom-trained models fused with spatiotemporal knowledge graphs. This creates what the company calls an 'Enterprise Hive Mind,' designed to transform vast amounts of marketing data into machine-readable intelligence that powers a suite of specialized AI agents for media, creative, and measurement.

On the other side is Symitri's PRISM AI, a multimodal AI engine built to decipher the 'noise of the open web.' Rather than tracking individuals, PRISM AI analyzes a wide array of data types—including text, images, and user behavior signals—to identify and create dynamic audience cohorts in real time. This 'Adaptive Intelligence' creates a living, evolving view of audience intent without needing to know the specific identity of any single user.

When combined, the system works by allowing advertisers to define a high-value audience. PRISM AI then scours the open web to find lookalike behavioral patterns, continuously creating and refining privacy-safe cohorts of users exhibiting similar intent. The madBuy DSP then uses this intelligence to execute buys across display, video, CTV, and mobile environments. This process shifts the focus from chasing individual users across the web to engaging anonymous, dynamically-generated groups based on real-time behavior.

The 'Walled Garden' Gauntlet and Privacy's New Frontier

The claim of achieving 'walled-garden-level performance' is the partnership's most ambitious and potentially transformative assertion. The primary evidence comes from a Q4 2025 pilot with a top-tier pharmaceutical advertiser, where the integrated solution reportedly expanded the brand's addressable footprint by nearly 200% by resolving signals from cookieless browsers and across different devices.

While these figures are compelling, they are self-reported, and the broader market will be watching closely as the solution becomes more widely available to see if such results can be replicated at scale. However, the technological approach itself is well-aligned with the industry's trajectory. By prioritizing dynamic, anonymous cohorts over individual identifiers, the system is inherently built for a privacy-first world.

This 'privacy-by-design' architecture is not just a marketing talking point; it is a strategic necessity. The solution is designed to be fully compliant with existing regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California. More importantly, its cohort-based methodology may prove resilient against future regulations, such as the EU's comprehensive AI Act, which places strict requirements on systems that process personal data for automated decision-making. By abstracting individuals into anonymous groups, the technology sidesteps many of the most contentious aspects of data privacy in advertising.

Navigating a Crowded Field

madSense and Symitri are not entering a vacuum. The race to solve the cookieless puzzle has spurred a wave of innovation across ad tech. Major DSPs like The Trade Desk, with its Koa AI, and Google, with its powerful Smart Bidding algorithms, have long integrated artificial intelligence to optimize campaigns. More recently, competitors like Yahoo have launched 'agentic AI' to automate campaign workflows. Simultaneously, identity resolution providers like LiveRamp have become essential infrastructure for connecting data in a privacy-compliant way.

Where the madSense-Symitri partnership aims to differentiate itself is in the native fusion of its specific technologies. While many platforms use AI, the claim of being the 'first' rests on the unique, ground-up integration of an OLM-powered agentic system with a real-time multimodal AI for audience generation. It represents a bet that a single, cohesive system can outperform a patchwork of disparate solutions.

Following the successful pilots, the integrated solution is now moving to broader availability for select enterprise and agency partners in the first quarter of 2026. The coming months will serve as the ultimate test, determining whether this powerful new combination of AI can truly level the playing field and usher in a renaissance for advertising on the open web.