RichRelevance to take over operation and development of CNET’s Intelligent Cross-Sell™ technology, which incorporates deep product data with personalized recommendations in key vertical categories
San Francisco, CA – April 20, 2011 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, and CNET Content Solutions, the world’s leading independent source of technology product information, have entered into a strategic partnership to offer CNET’s Intelligent Cross Sell™ as a RichRelevance solution. Under the terms of the agreement, RichRelevance will sell, support, and enhance Intelligent Cross Sell™, a product-recommendations solution specialized for the technology, consumer electronics, and office products categories. CNET will provide industry data, domain expertise, and sales support to RichRelevance for customers in these categories.
In addition, RichRelevance will license CNET’s DataSource™ for use with Intelligent Cross-Sell and the RichRelevance personalization suite. Through DataSource, RichRelevance will integrate the industry’s most comprehensive database of product attributes and compatibility data, covering more than five million tech, consumer-electronics, and office products worldwide into its personalized recommendations and Shopping Media offerings.
“RichRelevance is the established leader in retail personalization,” said Sean Murphy, VP and General Manager of CNET Content Solutions. “Their broad knowledge and reach is unsurpassed in the industry and, when combined with our vertical offering, will deliver powerful personalization for the largest retail sites on the Web. After careful consideration, it is clear that RichRelevance is the right strategic partner to continue to evolve our Intelligent Cross-Sell technology.”
RichRelevance currently serves more than 350 million product recommendations each day for a world-class client base that includes Wal-Mart, Sears and Office Depot. Moreover, with this partnership, RichRelevance will now serve seven of the top 10 online retail chains as ranked by Internet Retailer magazine based on revenue and volume.
RichRelevance CEO David Selinger explains: “CNET has established itself as a recommendations leader in verticals like technology, consumer electronics, and office products. These are critical categories for the largest sites on the web, so it’s natural for us to integrate that specialty into our offering, particularly as we continue to build out relationships with big box retailers in the electronics vertical. This partnership provides best-in-class and category-specific technology, product data, and intelligence that will be an important differentiator as the recommendations and personalization space evolves.”
Technical Fit
CNET’s data and technology provide a unique extra layer of intelligence for recommendations and personalization. Whereas RichRelevance’s flagship personalization offering RichRecs™ works mostly from anonymous profiles of people’s browsing and buying behavior, Intelligent Cross-Sell adds deep product profiles that include specs, compatibilities, and merchandising rules. This combination of insight about people’s behavior and products’ attributes is unique in the marketplace.
Wave of Consolidation Within Personalization Space
Industry watchers predict that a wave of consolidation will hit product recommendations in 2011. Writing in November 2010’s “What You Need to Know About Third-Party Recommendation Systems,” Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru stated: “While the venture capital community gets credit for keeping afloat the number of recommendation engine offers that currently exist, the industry is saturated and the next 24 months should see less outside capital, which will mean the coming of a long-awaited industry shakeout.”
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.
About CNET Content Solutions
CNET Content Solutions, (www.cnetcontentsolutions.com), a division of CBS Interactive, is the world’s leading independent source of product information. With detailed content on more than 5 million technology products in 15 languages, CNET Content Solutions helps thousands of resellers and retailers convert shoppers into buyers every day. From standardized content delivery to hosted services and custom solutions, CNET Content Solutions empowers businesses of all sizes to maximize the value of product information to improve their customer experience and bottom line. Customers include more than 2,100 e-commerce partners and websites, including CDW, Computacenter, Dabs.com, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Insight, Microsoft, OfficeMax, PC World Business and Tech Data.
Darren Vengroff to detail RichRelevance’s new open-source project designed to spur innovation in retail personalization through the cloud
San Francisco, CA – April 19, 2011 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, today announced that Chief Scientist Darren Vengroff has been selected to present on RecLab, an open-source project designed to spur retail innovation via the cloud. Vengroff’s session will detail how RecLab takes full advantage of the cloud and the implications for all kinds of research communities, focusing on the ways that the cloud can help researchers avoid the pitfalls that have historically made it difficult to work with real data and live traffic. The session takes place virtually on April 22 at 3 p.m. EDT, and will be available to conference attendees through the CloudSlam site, http://cloudslam.org/.
“Innovation in this space has been stifled to date, as researchers have lacked the environment to test their hypothesis and algorithms against actual consumers,” said Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist at RichRelevance and head of RecLab. “Through RecLab, we’re giving them the opportunity to go after actual industry challenges, including one of the most basic problems in retail: will someone buy this or not? By leveraging the flexibility and reach of our secure cloud, we’re enabling them take their best shot at coding a solution, testing it, ensuring it works, and then allowing it to run in a real retail environment. This is a huge spur to innovation and one that underlines the power that the cloud offers. I am extremely excited to join CloudSlam and showcase this novel approach to innovation through the cloud.”
RecLab is an open-source project operating under the Apache 2 license. It defines all of the key Java interfaces and APIs for interacting with the RecLab environment. It also provides simple implementations of these APIs that allow developers to design, test, and debug their algorithms quickly and efficiently without having to take the time, effort, or expense of setting up a large cluster of their own.
The project supports a wide variety of contextual and behavioral data, both at model build time and at runtime. Code running in RecLab has access to both immediate click-by-click and a wide variety of past shopping behavior. In RecLab, researchers begin with synthetic data sets, derived from probabilistic models, not real shoppers. However, once code has been written, tested, and debugged it can be submitted to run live against a small segment of traffic on a live retail site through the RichRelevance cloud. More information on the environment, as well as a tutorial on building models within the environment, can be found here.
About CloudSlam
This hybrid conference, April 18-22, is a global event, covering latest trends and innovations in the world of cloud computing. Conference panels, workshops, and tutorials are selected to cover a range of the hottest topics in cloud computing. More information on the agenda and registration can be found here.
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.
Industry leaders single out RichRelevance’s Shopping Media as the most promising technology to emerge for brand advertisers this year
San Francisco, CA – April 14, 2011 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic e-commerce personalization for the world’s largest retailers, today announced that it has won the 2011 ad:tech Innovation Award in the Shopper Marketing category. The award was presented to RichRelevance CEO David Selinger at the ad:tech San Francisco conference yesterday, following Selinger’s presentation on Shopping Media and the future of Shopper Marketing at the ad:tech San Francisco Startup Spotlight. Selinger’s session demonstrated how Shopping Media and RichRelevance’s enRICH for Brands can deliver superior results for CPG ad campaigns on leading retail web sites including Target, Sears and Overstock.com. In a live walk-through, Selinger showed how a hypothetical $500,000 ad campaign featuring Shopping Media delivers 20x industry standard engagement rates, increase in sales and unprecedented brand insights to agencies and advertisers.
“Shopping Media combines 1:1 personalization, optimization, data and insights – all in real-time in a way that is completely transparent to shoppers,” said Selinger. “As advertisers and agencies strive to engage consumers along the entire path to purchase, Shopping Media ensures that the right brand assets are available at the point of purchase in a way that enhances the shopping experience. Our clients understand that relevance deep in the funnel drives a huge uptick in online and offline purchases – and enables unprecedented brand measurement. It is very exciting to see this knowledge so eagerly embraced by the ad:tech community.”
In his session, Selinger also highlighted a real RichRelevance client, a leading toy manufacturer, who has used Shopping Media to generate and measure exceptional results:
- 27% increase in sales for advertiser-related products.
- 36,000 more searches (31% increase) for advertiser-related terms compared to 3 week period prior to campaign.
- 75% of all advertiser-related purchases sold during the campaign were driven by ads served through RichRelevance Shopping Media technology
Studies show that 41% of shoppers visit retail websites prior to making a store visit, and that 62% of shoppers engage in at least one digital deal activity for half or more of their shopping trips. Shopping Media complements 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. Through this technology, advertisers and marketers 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 – at the point of purchase. To date, the company serves more than 30 brand advertisers, including Universal Studios, Kellogg’s, Colgate Palmolive and Toyota.
About the ad:tech Innovation Awards
Ad:tech Innovation Award winners in data, mobile, social and shopper marketing were selected from companies who qualified for ad:tech’s Startup Spotlight Series at ad:tech San Francisco. The Startup Spotlight features the most promising services and technologies for brands and marketers in the digital space. For more information, please visit: http://www.ad-tech.com/sf/startup/ad-tech_startup.aspx
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.
I spent time at Web 2.0 SF recently, listening to presentations by industry leaders discussing the future of ecommerce. Several of the presentations were rehashed speeches from years past, but updated with this year’s buzzwords: “friending,” “Groupon” and “alien hand syndrome” (okay, I made that last one up, but I’d love to see that topic at a conference!)
My favorite session was presented by Alex Rampell, co-founder and CEO of TrialPay. Alex posed this interesting question to his audience: “What should you do when your customers aren’t searching for your keywords, and haven’t heard of your brand?”
David Selinger, an expert in the field of e-commerce data analytics and personalisation explains why retailers without a personalisation strategy are leaving money on the proverbial table.
Everyone that has kids—or ever was a kid—knows that the best way to avoid trouble is not to put yourself in a position where trouble is likely to find you in the first place. In the privacy realm, this means taking steps at the outset to minimize risk of exposure and mitigate the potential consequences of a breach or other inadvertent disclosure. The recently discovered database breach at Epsilon demonstrates how vulnerable personally identifiable information can be to unauthorized access and theft. For a third party vendor such as Epsilon, the consequences of these types of exposures are particularly wide reaching—potentially extending across an entire client base—exposing multiple brands not just to security concerns but to customer discontent. In the last couple of days, companies including Target, Kroger, TiVo, US Bank, Home Shopping Network, Ameriprise Financial, LL Bean, Visa Card, Brookstone, Walgreens, Disney Destinations, and Best Buy have notified their own customers about the breach.