RichRelevance Launches enRICH For Brands™, Introducing A New Era Of Shopping Media

Game-changing solution allows retailers to more effectively monetize their e-commerce sites while enabling brands to connect with consumers deep in the purchase funnel

San Francisco, CA – December 13, 2010 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic personalization for the world’s largest retailers, today launched enRICH for Brands, a breakthrough offering that allows major brands to deliver advertising that targets consumers while they are shopping the biggest retailers on the Web. Just as Shopper Marketing was created to assist brands with engaging in-store shoppers in relevant ways, this new form of advertising, called Shopping Media, is complementing the online shopping experience with engaging rich media – including video tutorials, testimonials, couponing, trials and reviews – integrated directly into product recommendations on leading retail sites. These personalized and highly relevant brand messages engage customers where it matters most – at the point of purchase – while adding value to the consumer experience and exposing shoppers to relevant, compelling content and products. Advertisers and agencies using enRICH for Brands gain an entirely new way to increase brand awareness, drive brand preference and increase cross-channel sales by telling their brand story where it has the most influence and impact. Retailers benefit from an innovative way to monetize their site traffic, adding additional profit to the bottom line through the introduction of brand advertising that enhances, instead of detracts from, the shopping experience.

“enRICH for Brands successfully blends relevant brand advertising with online shopping,” said David Selinger, CEO of RichRelevance. “This is a tremendous vehicle for generating incremental dollars for retailers while giving advertisers the ability to target the right customers with engaging media while they are shopping at the biggest retail sites in the world. No other company can claim the level of advanced retail targeting of RichRelevance and no other company has an e-commerce footprint as large as ours, making enRICH for Brands a tremendously disruptive force in advertising.”

“David has a tremendous track record in delivering relevant experiences, first at Amazon.com and now for retailers like Sears and Wal-Mart through RichRelevance,” said David Rosenblatt, former CEO of DoubleClick and advisor to RichRelevance. “This new offering provides a natural bridge between the retail site and tailored, personalized display advertising that is being evangelized by Google, AOL and the biggest advertisers in the world. The elegance and power of enRICH for Brands and Shopping Media make it a striking example of an emerging ad play that is going to transform online advertising for the forward-thinking brands and agencies who embrace it.”

“Rich Relevance provides an innovative rich media placement targeted within shopping media to reach our core Highlander audience,” said Toyota’s Digital Media & Brand Integration Manager, Kim Kyaw. “The ability to target and integrate into shopping channels with more than standard banners has been a difficult process in the past, and we are optimistic that our RichRelevance partnership will successfully accomplish this goal.”

Shopping Media: #1 Opportunity for Advertisers, Agencies & Retailers
Leading retail sites like Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others attract millions of consumers each month who are actively researching – and completing – online and offline purchases. This represents a huge opportunity for brand advertisers who want to engage consumers at the moment of greatest purchase intent. However, this audience has largely eluded advertisers because retailers have been wary to open up to irrelevant ads that disrupt the purchase cycle and get in the way of the consumer experience.
Shopping Media offers a new alternative. Just as Shopper Marketing was created to develop in-store programs that, in addition to driving sales, build brand equity for both products and retailers by engaging shoppers in relevant ways, Shopping Media introduces these same benefits in the online retail channel. Now advertisers can inject their best assets into the online shopping experience to deliver engaging brand messages where they matter most – directly on major retailing sites, where shoppers are most influenced for both online and offline purchases. Because the ads are delivered via RichRelevance’s recommendation engine, the context and message is directly relevant to the shopper’s goals and behavior, enhancing the purchase process and increasing the likelihood of a sale.

By combining the best of targeted advertising with the reach and scale of the world’s largest retail sites, Shopping Media drives brand engagement and sales while delivering a new revenue stream for retailers. In initial campaigns, enRICH for Brands has yielded 14x clickthrough rates as compared to traditional display ads, without taking into account the videos viewed as part of this campaign. This dramatic increase in engagement was accompanied by a 27% increase in sales for the brand’s products.

enRICH for Brands: Overview
Built on the industry-leading enRICH personalization platform that has delivered more than $1 billion in incremental sales to date, enRICH for Brands is a first-in-kind turnkey solution for retailers and advertisers. The solution features both standard IAB and custom ad units that are built and delivered by RichRelevance’s proprietary ad server.

Supported ad formats range from highly targeted banner ads to an entirely new ad unit called RichPlacementTM. With RichPlacement, advertisers can wrap their brands around personalized product recommendations, bringing custom creative, video, couponing, sampling elements and lead generation opportunities into the personalized recommendation module where they are available to millions of shoppers researching and completing purchases. A brand may also choose to highlight its products in a recommendation set if appropriate and relevant.

For example, a leading diapers brand can opt to sponsor personalized recommendations for baby care items in order to engage parents and drive sales. The recommendations will include the brand’s products when relevant to the shopping experience, as well as drop-down advertorial that includes custom content, an instructional video and a click-to-buy button that immediately takes shoppers to appropriate product pages.

enRICH for Brands: Features and Benefits
enRICH for Brands offers the key features that define successful shopping media for retailers and advertisers, including:

• Customized Rich Media: enRICH for Brands opens up direct access to inventory on the top retail sites in the world and allows advertisers to bring their best assets to consumers at the point of purchase. This includes TV commercials, video testimonials, trailers, reviews and other custom creative. Advertisers can also influence offline sales and build customer databases through the couponing and sampling supported by this format.
• Advanced Targeting: All ads are targeted to the right consumer at the right time using first-party data from the retailer’s own site in combination with RichRelevance’s industry-leading personalization technology that serves more than 350 million product recommendations each day on sites representing more than $20 billion in annual online sales. Advertisers can control where they want ads to show (store, category, product pages) and target by a variety of attributes including search terms, geo-location, past behavior and more. Advertisers can also choose which products to highlight in recommendation sets where they are relevant and elect to have the recommendation wrappers appear at various areas of the page (above the fold, etc.)
• Engagement Metrics: Advertisers gain access to deep engagement metrics at the point of purchase, with detailed information far surpassing traditional branding campaigns. Video engagement metrics, such as “time spent watching an advertiser’s TV commercial” is one example.
• Effective Monetization: With enRICH for Brands, retailers don’t have to hire their own media sales team in order to effectively monetize their site. The solution leverages existing recommendations real estate, so there are no additional integrations. Retailers now have access to brand advertising dollars, in addition to the historical trade (co-op/MDF) dollars they are accustomed to receiving.

“Shopping media and enRICH for Brands fills a tremendous gap for retailers, advertisers and consumers,” said Jake Bailey, Chief Evangelist at RichRelevance and one of the architects of the enRICH for Brands solution. “Retailers can now subsidize product prices with advertising that works and enhances, instead of diminishes, the shopping experience. Brands can tell their story, using video and other compelling offerings, at the place where the consumer is most receptive to their message, as well as rebuild sampling or coupon programs that have lost market share over the years. And consumers get the content and offers they want – when they want it – as they research and complete online and offline purchases.”

About RichRelevance
RichRelevance powers personalized shopping experiences for the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands, including Wal-Mart, Sears, Overstock.com and others. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and effectively monetize site traffic by providing the most relevant products, content and offers to shoppers as they switch between web, store and mobile. RichRelevance has delivered more than $1 billion in attributable sales for its clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of personalized advertising called shopping media which allows brands to engage shoppers where it matters most – at the point of purchase on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is located in San Francisco, with offices in Seattle and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.