RichRelevance Releases “Finding Your Audience”: The Definitive Guide to Maximizing Shopping Media for Agencies and Brands

New report digs into the right tools to define, find and reach the right online consumer at the right time in the right context

San Francisco, CA – Mar. 13, 2012 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic personalization for the world’s largest retailers and brands, today released a new whitepaper, Finding Your Audience, to help advertisers put a stop to wasted impressions in order to impact the consumer on their path to purchase.

The report examines what the rise of mobile devices and resulting “ubiquity of screens” means for brands and offers concrete strategies to shift media investments to directly align with consumers as they shop and research products through multiple vehicles (online, social, mobile, flash sales, etc.). Finding Your Audience goes beyond theory to provide a step-by-step guide to define the right target audience, determine where and when to reach them, and pinpoint the method that will have the largest brand and sales impact.

The whitepaper also illuminates pitfalls with popular approaches such as third-party intent data, as well as industry ad servers. Key topics include:

• WHO is Your Audience: Defining “Who” Matters: Nearly half of in-store purchases today are influenced by online research (source: Google & IPSOS OTX, September 2010). Google and other search engines have found a way to insert themselves at the top level of “intent” within the shopping funnel, but Shopping Media goes to the point of sale to ensure that brands can target consumers when they are in the shopping mindset.
• WHERE is Your Audience: “Where” Do They Begin Their Path to Purchase? After defining a target audience, brands must target the right impressions that capture the greatest value. Targeting audiences on retail sites is richly contextual, precise and offers new opportunities through co-occurrence targeting and adjacencies of complementary categories.
• WHEN to Reach Your Audience: Timing is Everything: Beyond owning impressions in your brand’s category, the “when” of targeting an audience involves attacking the points of intent within retail such as visits brand’s product pages, keyword searches for, add-to-cart impressions, and impressions that can capture consumers with previous relevant session behavior.
• HOW to reach your audience: Targeting is pointless without the right vehicle for execution. To ensure the highest ROI, an ad server must be able to understand retail. When buying impression, brands must be able to integrate personalization and retailer promotions within an ad campaign, as well as do things like “target my ads to anyone that has put my products in their shopping cart” or “buy all impressions for people that have purchased my products in the last 30 days.”
“A consumer’s shopping mode can be turned on at any moment, from anywhere – in bed with an iPad, on the bus, or waiting in line at the store,” said Jake Bailey, Chief Evangelist at RichRelevance. “The old rules of media buying no longer apply and brands are under tremendous pressure to find their target market when and where it matters most. Technology is changing advertising today in countless way, but one thing is certain: It’s always best to engage consumers while they are shopping and researching products, and the brands that do will be the ones that win.”

AboutRichRelevance
Over 350 million times per day, RichRelevance is powering the personalized shopping experiences for consumers shopping the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands like Walmart, Sears, Target, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $5 Billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called Shopping Media which allows manufacturers to engage consumers where it matters most—in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle, Boston and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.