Issue #73: The Geography of Wealth

☕ Good morning, targeting tacticians

This is First Impressions - a weekly spotlight on adtech start-up stories.

📖 First Impressions - Calder

This time round for First Impressions we spoke with Rohan Lala, Co-Founder at Calder, about affluent audience targeting - how wealth is far more local and behaviour-driven than most marketers assume and how his company is combining data, geography and media strategy to help brands reach wealthy consumers with more precision.

What problem did you become obsessed with and why?

Marketing to wealthy consumers online is way harder than people think.

Most of the industry still uses basic income targeting or broad ZIP codes and calls it affluent. But that’s not really how wealth works. It’s much more concentrated, and two people in the same area can have completely different spending power.

I spent a lot of time on the buying side and you see pretty quickly where this breaks down.

Everyone kind of knows it’s not great, but people just work around it. And honestly most teams just accept that as the way things are.

That’s what we got stuck on.

How does your company solve this problem?

We started by building our own dataset around wealth, but that’s only part of it.

We combine that with a range of other data sources. Property, financial, behavioural, location. Even things like events and publisher activity. It’s a mix, and it gives us a much clearer picture of who these people actually are and how they behave.

From there we try to make it usable.

We map where wealth actually exists at a pretty granular level, way deeper than most people go.

We build audiences based on how people spend, not just what they earn.

And we think a lot about where ads actually show up, not just who they target.

Then we plug all of that into how media is already bought, so it’s easy to activate without changing someone’s entire setup.

What do you do differently from other businesses trying to solve this problem?

Most companies in this space pick one lane. They either sell data or they sell media.

We’ve always looked at it as one problem.

It’s not that useful to say “here’s a wealthy audience” if you’re not also thinking about where that audience actually spends time and what environments make sense to reach them.

We also don’t rely on just one dataset. We’re constantly layering different signals together and updating that view.

And the geography piece matters more than people think. A lot of people still operate at the ZIP code level, but wealth really lives much more locally than that.

What do you get right early on to build the best vendor-client partnerships?

We try not to overcomplicate things.

Early on it’s mostly about being aligned on what success actually looks like. Not clicks or random metrics, but real outcomes.

A lot of this space is abstract, so we spend time making it visual. Our map is a good example of that, and we’ll often build custom versions for clients so they can actually see where their audience is and how a campaign is shaping up.

We also bring measurement in early. Whether that’s performance, location-based insights, or conversion signals, we want clients to understand what’s working and why.

And we usually try to get something live pretty quickly. You learn a lot more from actually running something than talking about it for weeks.

What are you paying closest attention to in adtech over the next 12 months?

Signal quality is a big one.

There’s a lot of data out there, but not all of it is very good. As things move away from third party data, I think the gap between real signals and generic ones is going to become more obvious.

The other thing is where people are actually spending time.

If you’re trying to reach wealthier consumers, they’re often in environments with fewer ads. Subscriptions, premium content, that kind of thing. So it becomes less about just targeting and more about where and how you show up.

Got feedback, suggestions or interested in partnerships? Hit reply and let us know.

See you next time,

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