Truecaller asks users what they want to buy

Truecaller wants advertisers to stop guessing what people want and simply ask them.

The caller-identification company launched Truecaller Pulse on 6 August 2026, announcing it from Lagos, Nigeria. The product runs interactive ads that ask users direct questions about what they intend to buy, then turns those answers into audience segments advertisers can target while the stated intent is still fresh.

Declared rather than inferred

Conventional targeting infers intent from behaviour: browsing history, prior purchases, and signals collected as by-products of other activities. Truecaller is calling its approach first-party and zero-party data, meaning information the user knowingly hands over rather than data reconstructed about them.

The company breaks it down into three steps: brands ask a direct question, responses are sorted into preference, discovery, and purchase-intent signals, and those signals become real-time segments for retargeting. It is pitching the result as usable for product launches, spotting emerging category demand, and identifying customers actively shopping for a competitor.

Why the privacy framing matters here

The declared intent pitch lands amid a tightening regulatory backdrop. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa all now operate data-protection regimes that constrain how behavioural profiles are assembled, and asking a user directly is easier to defend than inferring from tracking.

Whether it works commercially depends on how many people answer an advertisement’s question, a number Truecaller has not published. The company also has not disclosed which African markets get the product first, beyond the Lagos announcement.

Truecaller has been steadily building products around its African user base rather than treating the region as an afterthought: it launched an AI commerce tool in June and opened its business messaging platform to partners from Lagos in April.