Cookie-Free IP Targeting: The HostingAdvice Interview

In January 2020, HostingAdvice.com ran a profile of El Toro — "A Personalized Approach: El Toro Enables Advertisers to Reach Select Prospects and Customers Via Cookie-Free IP and Device Targeting" — and I was the one they talked to. The company line El Toro used at the time was "We will never remain stagnant," and this interview was a good snapshot of why.

Why Cookies Were Crumbling

The piece laid out the problem that was becoming obvious in adtech: cookies are sandboxed inside mobile apps and can't track user activity there, and more than 40% of marketers surveyed said cookie-based tracking doesn't accurately identify persistent users. Cookie-based advertising was losing its appetite — and the industry needed a different approach.

The El Toro Approach

El Toro's answer was one-to-one, cookie-free IP targeting: pairing physical addresses, IP addresses, and devices with incredible precision, so advertisers can run account-based marketing and CRM targeting that actually maps to real people. Here's the quote they used from me: "With El Toro, advertisers can target their intended online customer base by matching CRM data with IP address locations for effective one-to-one marketing."

The original HostingAdvice page has since been retired, but the interview lives on in the Wayback Machine and in El Toro's Facebook post announcing it. Reading it back now, the through-line is still true: we were never going to stay stagnant, and IP targeting was just the beginning of where big data, AI, and machine learning were headed in adtech.

Think this argument fits your event? Tell me about the room — the calendar is selective.