Home Online Advertising PreciseTarget Exits Stealth Mode With Aggregated Retail Data Solutions

PreciseTarget Exits Stealth Mode With Aggregated Retail Data Solutions

SHARE:

PreciseTarget publicly launched its first retail audience data segments on LiveRamp on Friday.

PreciseTarget ingests audience and transaction data from more than 200 retail partners, primarily brick-and-mortar companies. It then anonymizes the data and packages audiences based on taste affiliations, like men who wear mid-priced vacation clothing or women who purchase expensive cosmetics.

General taste preferences are more useful than brand or product retargeting, said Rob McGovern, PreciseTarget’s founder and CEO.

“The data is clear that consumers are loyal to their tastes, but not necessarily to brands,” which is why someone’s closet might have a cohesive style but not all the same clothing lines, McGovern said.

PreciseTarget’s daily data intake comes from the affiliate marketing programs of its 200 or so retailer partners. The data company becomes an authorized affiliate partner – not to run affiliate marketing campaigns, but to see the full product catalogue from each retailer.

The startup also gets more in-depth transaction and loyalty program data from some retailers, McGovern said. PreciseTarget then scrubs that data of PII and turns it into a synthetic ID. Unlike hashed IDs, like a hashed email or home address that’s used as the foundation for an audience profile, synthetic IDs can’t be used to identify an actual person by PreciseTarget or marketers. That provides an extra layer of privacy security since retailers are pooling their product and audience data, he said.

Marketers or ad tech vendors like DSPs can turn PreciseTarget’s synthetic IDs into actionable audience segments by matching the taste segments to Equifax, which the retail data startup uses as its truth set. So even after audience segments are sold on LiveRamp, Equifax still translates PreciseTarget’s anonymous data into advertising IDs that can be targeted online or used for campaign attribution.

PreciseTarget plans to sell its retail data more broadly, like with Oracle or The Trade Desk. Starting with LiveRamp’s marketplace and Equifax as the identity data set make sense to start because they integrate with practically every retailer and mar tech company, McGovern said.

Retailers and product sellers need aggregated data to compete on even terms with Amazon or sophisticated ecommerce companies.

Aside from its audience segment sales, PreciseTarget offers a subscription service for retailers to analyze their own customers or to personalize sites ad apps in real time.

“How come Amazon’s homepage is personalized to whoever shows up to browse but everyone sees the same Macy’s or Nordstrom’s homepage?” McGovern said. The answer is sparse data, he said. Even if the retailer recognizes a site visitor from a previous purchase or browsing session, it doesn’t know a personalized product assortment that might fit the shopper.

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

PreciseTarget’s revenue is still mostly in audience segment sales, though, not retail tech services.

The company has a run rate of only $10 million, and hasn’t raised any venture capital. McGovern, who previously founded and sold CareerBuilder and JobFox, funds the business himself.

Like PreciseTarget, Amazon focuses on taste preferences, not re-surfacing products or brands that person has shopped before, he said. And that’s helped Amazon raise its average purchase count per Prime customer to 75 items per year. Brick-and-mortar retailers average just two purchases per year, he said.

“From the consumer perspective, it’s going to seem like the retailer and the brands have a better understanding of their preferences,” he said. “But what retailers need to make that happen is to have a successful unknown company using data from across the retail landscape.”

Must Read

Comic: No One To Play With

Google Pulls The Plug On Topics, PAAPI And Other Major Privacy Sandbox APIs (As The CMA Says ‘Cheerio’)

Google’s aborted cookie crackdown ends with a quiet CMA sign-off and a sweeping phaseout of Privacy Sandbox technologies, from the Topics API to PAAPI.

The Trade Desk’s Auction Evolutions Bring High Drama To The Prebid Summit

TTD shared new details about OpenAds features that let publishers see for themselves whether it’s running a fair auction. But tension between TTD and Prebid hung over the event.

Monopoly Man looks on at the DOJ vs. Google ad tech antitrust trial (comic).

How Google Stands In The DOJ’s Ad Tech Antitrust Suit, According To Those Who Tracked The Trial

The remedies phase of the Google antitrust trial concluded last week. And after 11 days in the courtroom, there is a clearer sense of where Judge Leonie Brinkema is focused on, and how that might influence what remedies she put in place.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

The Ad Context Protocol Aims To Make Sense Of Agentic Ad Demand

The AI advertising agents will need their own trade group eventually. For now though, a bunch of companies are forming the Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP.

OUTFRONT Is Using Agencies’ AI Enthusiasm To Spur Wider Programmatic OOH Adoption

The desire for a data-driven reinvention of OOH inspired OUTFRONT to create agentic AI tools for executing and measuring OOH campaigns and comparing OOH to other channels.

Inside PubDesk, The Trade Desk’s New Dashboard That Shows What Buyers Actually Care About

A peek inside PubDesk, The Trade Desk’s new dashboard that gives sellers detailed info on how buyers value their inventory.