While publishers have been getting deeper into the integrated marketing business, female-focused celebrity news and pop culture media platform PopSugar is trying to go one step further by starting an analytics business.
PopSugar Insights’ ambition is to become a daily repository of data and trend analysis of women 18-40, the company’s core audience, said Rob McLoughlin, who previously served as SVP of consumer insights at SpinMedia and who was brought in this month to run PopSugar Insights.
“Traditionally, researchers have always focused on publishing their findings and waited for users to come them and find it,” McLoughlin said. “We’re taking a different approach. We want this to be a day-to-day resource that gets shared and talked about, allowing anyone to see what trends are emerging against a variety of verticals.”
PopSugar Insights gathers data from viewers of its main line of business, entertainment content, as well as search engine shopping portal ShopStyle. It will layer that first-party data with analytics from its main partner, market-research company Ipsos.
“The scale and access to PopSugar’s internal data and external data with Ipsos, was a combination that, if we get it right – and I think we’re going to – can have a significant influence on marketers and agencies that want to learn more on how to reach women,” McLoughlin said. “As PopSugar Insights develops, we expect to include more analytics from other vendors and researchers.”
The debut of PopSugar Insights comes as the entertainment content company is trying other ways to expand its reach to marketers and consumers. Last week, it acquired a photo storage technology provider Pict. Billed as a way to create a virtual “storefront” for ecommerce marketers, Pict is being folded into PopSugar’s main content site as well to the company’s ShopSense as an added service to its affiliate marketers.
And while PopSugar Insights tries to position itself as general font of marketing information about women, PopSugar itself has been working with data-management platform (DMP) BlueKai on research related to mobile data collection, particularly around cookie restrictions and geolocation.
