Launching enRICH for Brands

Today we launched enRICH for Brands, a new brand-advertising vehicle that enables dynamically personalized ad placements on major retail sites—real estate that is garnering the term “Shopping Media.” I’d like to take a moment to pause and strike this moment into our corporate history. The launch of this product represents a seminal moment for our company, online retail and the advertising industry. It also represents years of work by every single member of our team. Be forewarned: I am going to take this opportunity to wax poetic about how all of this came to be.

First, a little bit of history. Three years ago we launched RichRelevance as a cutting edge recommendations/personalization company, to help retailers build much needed sophistication into their sites. However, we also saw another potential market opportunity: “How do we bring together the scale and volume of internet advertising with the fundamental data and value of ecommerce?” We saw the value of personalization technology in bringing advertising closer to the individual—more attuned than ever before to their context, needs, and behaviors. Applied correctly, online advertising has, more than any other channel thus far, the greatest potential to bring messaging in stride with the activity of individuals. Yet, the primary option for advertisers has been the ubiquitous banner ad, which bears a distinct similarity to a freeway billboard that commuters fly past with barely a glance. At the end of the day, the ability to capture attention at precisely the right moment and in the right context is truly the real currency of the Internet—pursued by both brand advertisers and retailers. The solution we came to, enRICH for Brands, closes the divide between advertisers and retailers by speaking to their shared interest, relevance to the consumer.

As a company, we’ve kept this new approach safe and secret…until today. After numerous man-(and woman-)years of work we are proudly announcing a never-before-seen, robust program with major retailers. These retailers have embodied the vision of enRICH for Brands and are seeing the value-add to their customer experience and their bottom line.

Steve Jobs once said, “To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.” And the same is true here.

What we’re doing is new and innovative and it has taken hard work on all legs of our company from IT operations running the servers to helpdesk/operations/legal keeping the team up and running to engineers building the solution to marketing and sales moving it to market. Many, many people have poured their hearts and souls into the successful launch of this product (and a few hours of late-night work too) and I want to use this moment to acknowledge all of their hard work and brilliant use of their particular disciplines. [pause]

Thanks to all of the {rr} team. The results we’re seeing are already amazing because of you—and we’ve got a long runway before us. I look forward to watching enRICH for Brands flourish.