Owner targeting
Another interesting approach comes from Owner IQ, which calls its model "owner targeting." The company collects data on user actions that demonstrate product ownership to deliver prospects with highly probable interest in categories, brands, and interests. Then it delivers media as an ad network. Like regular networks, it measures interest via site visit behavioral data, but adds ownership data points to sharpen its perspective.
Online actions that demonstrate ownership might include:
- Looking at the online owner's manual for a TV set
- Analysis of searches and page visits for specific items (e.g., a search for replacement iPod accessories would confirm ownership of an iPod)
- Product registrations online
- Actual purchase data from online retailers
You might think that knowing what people have already purchased defeats the purpose of targeting. After all, we want to sell stuff. But by understanding someone's ownerships, and adding that to other behaviors, Owner IQ says its model is highly predictive of future purchases. It also tracks "duress behaviors" that are predictive of the desire to trade up from existing items.
Conclusion
Other brands are getting results from these tactics, in part because each represents a "green field" of potential insight. That's not to diminish the relevance of regular BT data, but rather to suggest that lots of brands can benefit from more approaches and data sets. Marketers often despair that they cannot identify "on buttons" for their businesses -- paths to better results. Fortunately for those of us in digital, these five approaches represent insights and information that might well take us to Spinal Tap's Holy Grail of "11."
You are a heck of a lot more likely to get performance improvements from new data.
Jim Nichols is senior partner at Catalyst: SF.
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