NEW YORK, Sept. 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Dstillery, the predictive audience company, today announced that it has been named a finalist in two categories for the 2026 AdExchanger Awards: Leadership in Advertising, recognizing Chief Data Scientist Melinda Han Williams, and AI Innovators – Agentic Platforms & Operating Systems, recognizing DS-1, Dstillery’s Agentic AI Advertising Platform.
The dual recognition highlights Dstillery’s continued leadership in advancing AI across the advertising ecosystem, from the people shaping how AI is applied to advertising to the technology transforming how marketers plan, build, activate, and optimize campaigns.
“We’re thrilled to see both Melinda and DS-1 recognized by the AdExchanger Awards,” said Michael Beebe, Dstillery CEO. “These honors reflect the two important aspects of Dstillery’s approach to AI: our investments in high-performance predictive audience solutions and our embrace of agentic AI to make those solutions simple and frictionless for our advertisers to build, customize and activate.”
Recognizing leadership in AI and advertising
Melinda Han Williams, Dstillery’s Chief Data Scientist, was named a finalist in the Leadership in Advertising category. A recognized voice in data science and AI, Melinda has played a key role advancing Dstillery’s predictive AI capabilities and shaping conversations about the future of AI in advertising.
Her work spans the development and application of multimodal AI, predictive modeling, and privacy-conscious approaches to audience targeting, helping marketers navigate an increasingly complex digital advertising landscape.
Recognizing agentic AI in action
Dstillery’s DS-1 Agentic AI Advertising Platform was named a finalist in the AI Innovators – Agentic Platforms & Operating Systems category.
Dstillery has spent more than a decade building AI-based predictive targeting solutions for programmatic advertising. DS-1 puts that technology to work for media buyers across the end-to-end media buying workflow. Spanning the full campaign lifecycle, from planning to custom modeling, activation, and in-flight optimization, DS-1 keeps human experts in control of every decision while agents handle the manual work.
DS-1 is already in market and in use by dozens of media teams. It is a working application of agentic AI rather than a pilot or proof of concept, helping marketers move beyond experimentation and put AI to work in live campaigns today.
“The industry has spent two years talking about what agentic AI could do for marketers. DS-1 is what it looks like in practice,” said Taejin In, Chief Product Officer at Dstillery. “Media teams are using it today to go from a brief to a live, optimized campaign, with experts in control of every decision along the way.”
Learn more about the 2026 AdExchanger Awards and Finalists: https://www.adexchanger.com/go/awards-2026/.
ABOUT DSTILLERY
Dstillery is the predictive audience company, helping marketers reach exactly the right audience for every digital campaign. Powered by multimodal AI and its agentic platform, DS-1, Dstillery enables precise audience targeting at scale, simplifying workflows and driving superior campaign outcomes.
Dstillery’s predictive models learn across data modalities – including web journeys, CTV signals, search signals, purchase intent signals, and more – to build a robust understanding of a brand’s best customers and activate high-performing audiences across programmatic and social channels.
For more than a decade, Dstillery has set the standard for AI-driven audience solutions, backed by award-winning data science and a growing portfolio of 25 patents. To learn more, visit www.dstillery.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
ABOUT ADEXCHANGER
Since 2008, AdExchanger has engaged readers with award-winning and trendsetting coverage of programmatic advertising and the data-driven marketing technology ecosystem. It has earned a spot as the leading voice covering how technology and data are transforming digital media and advertising.
AdExchanger’s award-winning publication facilitates the exchange of ideas between all members of the ecosystem, including marketers, agencies, publishers, data providers, advertising and marketing technology companies, analysts, the investment community and the press.
AdExchanger, powered by the Chief Marketer Network, attracts more than 290,000 monthly unique visitors, and editorial newsletters and articles land in more than 55,000 subscribers’ inboxes daily. We produce the leading conferences in programmatic media, Programmatic AI Las Vegas and Programmatic I/O New York where industry professionals gather to connect, learn and thrive in a productive environment that delivers actionable take-aways and introduces the latest tools, trends and best practices.
Dstillery Media Contact
Danielle DeVoren
ddevoren@kcsa.com
