Retailigence, a mobile location company that connects brand advertisers with brick-and-mortar pricing and product availability down to the SKU, has turned an eye toward ad tech vendors.
Rolling out on Wednesday an adPop Engine for channel partners, of which Medialets, AdColony, PointRoll, Tremor Video and Xtopoly are early users, the company, which bills itself as an offline-to-online marketing platform, is looking to infuse location-based shopper audience data with dynamic ad servers.
“To bring up extremely relevant, ultra-current information from a retail source for shoppers to say, ‘What can we show you that will make you engage, interact and be legitimately useful to you?’ was the impetus for us connecting with Retailigence,” commented David Simon, CMO of PointRoll.
PointRoll (which was acquired by Gannett in 2005) focuses on dynamic creative optimization, working with a number of brands ranging from Staples to CVS, to help them dynamically surface creative and rich media. PointRoll’s technology, according to Simon, “enables us to figure out who to show an ad to, what information we have permission to leverage and then basically build an ad in 10-20 milliseconds.”
Particularly as it pertains to dynamic ad insertion and creative in the retail vertical, Simon said it’s still early days, but as the in-store experience shifts with shopper innovations around reserve online and pick up in-store, there is increased demand for ways to integrate options for reserving a product or determining local availability of that product in the ad unit itself.
“What happens, technically, as the individual hits the publisher page… [because] Retailigence has a connection to many retail systems, we’re able to say, ‘There are three products available in this store one mile from you,’” commented Matthew Shevach, SVP of ad solutions for Retailigence. “In general, we are getting data from retailers directly or partners who have been designated as the owner or distributor of that data.”
Retailigence two years ago hitched its massive database of SKUs and retail product and pricing data to demand-side platform (DSP) DataXu’s wagon. This gave retail marketers a way to infuse local store inventory data into mobile display by targeting ads based on “nearby” product availability. Other early DSP partners included PocketMath and Human Demand.
While Retailigence used to lay a majority of the structural bricks itself in campaigns marrying location and product-level data, Shevach said the company has been emphasizing partner implementations. That’s not to say Retailigence is forgoing agency meetings, but building a partner ecosystem is a higher priority now that the tech’s got some leverage in scale.
“I think it’s been a rising tide in using this data in a programmatic way over the last six to nine months,” he said. “We’re able to connect highly scalable information about where the product’s located [and map] events, but the challenge is how should the [dynamic creative] look? It’s a combination of a template, tool-based approach with a custom design layered on top.”
