HicMobile cuts campaign planning time 70% with Azure AI–powered precision and scale

To meet rising demand for faster, more precise campaign targeting in the mobile advertising industry, HicMobile built Target Finder, an AI-powered tool using Azure AI Foundry, Azure App Service, and Azure SQL Database for instant marketing insights.

Developed in collaboration with Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab and refined with internal and client-facing teams, the solution transforms unstructured campaign data into real-time, high-value audience recommendations.

HicMobile saved countless hours on manual audience research. With Target Finder, proposals now build themselves, supporting 600-plus campaigns yearly and boosting efficiency across the company’s €5M turnover, freeing experts to focus on strategy.

HicMobile, a DGS Company, is a leading advertising technology company that helps top retail brands across Europe deliver smarter, faster advertising and media campaigns. For HicMobile’s sales team, every proposal felt like a race against time. Clients expected precision and speed, but personalizing proposals meant long hours, manual research, and inconsistent delivery. With data scattered across disconnected systems, even seasoned reps struggled to keep up. The pressure to deliver targeted campaigns was quickly mounting—and the cracks were starting to show.

  To address rising campaign volume and climbing client expectations, the company needed more than just efficiency. It needed intelligence. Sales reps were spending hours per proposal, manually sourcing and stitching together key information from past campaigns. Too much institutional knowledge was locked in disconnected tools. 

  “We had years of insights sitting in PDFs, Excel files, and our SQL database,” recalls Angelica Perez, Software Engineer at HicMobile. “We needed a system that could learn from our past—and apply it instantly.” 

The breakthrough: Target Finder

To meet the growing demand for accuracy at speed, HicMobile developed Target Finder, an AI-powered internal tool built with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry.   

  Target Finder began with the question “Could AI replicate and scale the insight of HicMobile’s senior marketing consultants?” To find out, the team ran extensive evaluations of language models, measuring consultants’ ability to understand complex inputs and generate relevant, high-quality targeting recommendations. After rigorous testing, Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models stood out, offering fluency, relevance, and greater control.  

  Fueled by Azure OpenAI, Azure SQL Database, and Azure App Service, Target Finder replicates the insight of experienced marketers in seconds. In just six months, HicMobile transformed Target Finder from a prototype into a production-ready solution. The platform is built on cloud-native infrastructure with the latest GPT-series models at its core. This enables it to deliver intelligent recommendations in real time. Azure provided the enterprise-scale performance and security that HicMobile needed to move fast—and trust the results.  

   “If you can build something that makes it easier for your team to deliver the best options—not just effective campaigns, but ones that show your company is forward-thinking—that’s when you start making a real impact,” says Enrico Majer, CEO at HicMobile.  

Target Finder delivers faster campaigns, smarter targeting, and scale with confidence 

To build Target Finder, HicMobile consolidated years of campaign data, much of which was unstructured and scattered. Azure AI Document Intelligence extracted critical data from PDFs, while Azure SQL Database served as the central repository, keeping data organized and ready for lightning-fast query responses. SQL Database also delivered greater security, reliability, and scalability to support continuous, high-volume campaign delivery.  

With the Azure AI Search semantic ranker feature, teams can retrieve information from previous campaigns, using natural language queries. When a question is submitted, Azure AI Search fetches the most relevant results, and a language understanding model distills those findings. By employing the Azure technology stack, HicMobile transformed static files into an interactive knowledge base. This was designed to support more efficient decision-making processes.  

“Now we can walk into a client meeting with confidence and say, ‘We know your customers—because we’ve matched first-party knowledge to third-party data.”

Valentina Fermo, Digital Ad Ops Lead, HicMobile

How Target Finder works

When a salesperson opens Target Finder, campaign variables are entered, such as brand, product, competitor, strategy goals, planning area, and budget. In seconds, Azure OpenAI analyzes those inputs and returns high-value audience segments with demographic and behavioral insights. 

“Now we can walk into a client meeting with confidence and say, ‘We know your customers—because we’ve matched first-party knowledge to third-party data,’” says Valentina Fermo, Digital Ad Ops Lead at HicMobile. 

Even junior team members can generate proposals with confidence. The system adapts over time, so changing one input like age range can completely shift targeting. Because it’s built entirely on Azure, Target Finder interoperates easily with HicMobile’s existing data pipelines and sales workflows. This minimizes disruption and maximizes speed to value. 

“We used Microsoft’s documentation and worked with the lab to validate our architecture. That collaboration helped us design a scalable, secure stack with Azure SQL Database, Azure App Service, and Microsoft Defender.”

Angelica Perez, Software Engineer, HicMobile

What it takes to build smarter, faster campaigns

HicMobile collaborated with internal teams and client-facing stakeholders to refine the targeting logic, ensuring the system reflects real-world campaign goals and evolving buyer behavior. In addition, throughout development, HicMobile worked with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Lab for architectural validation and guidance. This helped the team go from prototype to launch in just six months, accelerating the timeline by 70%.  

“We used Microsoft’s documentation and worked with the lab to validate our architecture. That collaboration helped us design a scalable, secure stack with Azure SQL Database, Azure App Service, and Microsoft Defender,” notes Perez.  

The lab helped avoid common deployment pitfalls, aligning to best practices, and improving performance and security. HicMobile generated a working prototype 11.25 times faster than going it alone, delivering value sooner.  

High-availability marketing campaigns with 99.95% uptime

Security isn’t just a back-end concern—it’s a requirement for the sales and ad operations teams who rely on real-time access to sensitive campaign data. With enterprise-grade protection from Microsoft Defender for Cloud, including Defender for App Service and Defender for Azure SQL Databases, HicMobile’s sales team can confidently propose, launch, and optimize campaigns, knowing that client data is safeguarded at every step.   

Features like encrypted communications, automated patching, and application-level isolation help ensure security is built in, not bolted on. Therefore, the sales team never has to worry about system downtime disrupting a client conversation or delaying a proposal. Perez explains, “Our uptime is 99.95%, and that reliability is critical when clients are depending on us.”  

HicMobile designed Target Finder to be highly scalable—essential for supporting the demands of continuous, high-volume campaign delivery. To achieve this, the platform is hosted on Azure App Service, a fully managed cloud environment that automates infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. This freed up HicMobile to focus on innovation rather than operations, while helping ensure consistent performance and reliability. Azure App Service includes built-in load balancing and seamless interoperation with other Azure services. This plays a foundational role in delivering the speed and scale required for real-time campaign planning.  

“We don’t want to be remembered simply as the inventors. We want to be the ones who brought innovation to the industry, transforming campaigns into precise and effective results.”

Enrico Majer, CEO, HicMobile

A smarter standard for campaign targeting

Since launch, HicMobile has supported 600-plus campaigns across approximately €5 million in mobile annual turnover, all without expanding the team. Junior consultants build confident proposals, and senior experts focus on strategy. The result is faster turnaround, greater efficiency, and scalable growth.  

  HicMobile is now preparing to launch Target Finder as a software as a service (SaaS) product for midsize agencies throughout Europe. The goal is to turn internal IP into an industry-standard platform for AI-powered campaign strategy.   

  By packaging its solution, HicMobile is shifting from media services to software. The platform codifies years of targeting and optimization expertise into a repeatable, scalable solution. It’s also designed for flexibility, so agencies can tailor campaign logic, audience input, and output formats to specific needs. Although initially designed for media application, any team that relies on fast, data-backed decisions—whether in media, marketing, or beyond—can learn from HicMobile’s approach to scalable intelligence.  

  “We don’t want to be remembered simply as the inventors. We want to be the ones who brought innovation to the industry, transforming campaigns into precise and effective results,” concludes Majer. 

 Discover more about HicMobile on LinkedIn.