Quotient, which originated as the consumer-facing Coupons.com in the late ’90s, is pushing deeper into programmatic media.
The company has launched the Quotient Media Exchange (QMX), a digital media platform that lets CPG and retailer advertisers target ads across Quotient’s publisher network, including Coupons.com, Facebook and other third-party retail partner sites.
Another day, another programmatic exchange, but the catch here is that Quotient hopes to smarten advertiser segments by tapping into its set of proprietary shopper data.
The Quotient Media Exchange reaches 55 million unique users in the United States. Quotient saw an opportunity to combine in-store transaction and loyalty data with behavioral and intent signals, much like the logic behind the Criteo and HookLogic deal.
QMX leverages purchase data sets from Quotient’s RetailerIQ platform, which is used by 21 retailers, including Walgreens and Dollar General, to promote products, push recommendations and deliver e-receipts and interactive shopping lists.
QMX basically aggregates and segments Retailer IQ data based on attributes such as category-level purchases, brand or store affinity and geolocation. It also builds custom segments if, for instance, a CPG supplier wants to reach a certain audience or layer in their own first-party data.
But QMX isn’t just meant for targeting. Quotient aims to measure the effectiveness of those campaigns by linking them back to transactional data. The company distributes digital promotions for more than 2,000 brands across 700 consumer packaged-goods companies, including P&G.
Grocery, drug and mass retailers like CVS and Albertsons-Safeway use Quotient to load card-linked offers for their loyalty members.
Quotient claims it can blend a unique mix of in-store and transactional data along with behavioral insights it gleans from more than 17 million unique monthly visitors to Coupons.com and its publisher network.
“CPG marketers have to make decisions a lot faster now and deploy capital based on data analytics wherever they can,” said Steven Boal, CEO of Quotient. “The ability to turn information around about the efficacy of a program based on online and offline performance allows them to make those decisions much faster.”
The exchange could help Quotient address a common manufacturer pain point – lack of insight into the sale at the retail level – and how it all ties back to media exposure.
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Although there is a surplus of companies aiming to tackle the problem for CPG manufacturers, Quotient thinks it can provide a wider lens into retailer data than those platforms that rely only on individual store or loyalty data.
“In a highly competitive environment where there’s pricing pressure, loyalty data allows you to address your own shoppers, but it’s very hard to move the needle past that,” Boal said. “Retailers and CPGs are addressing this by looking at cross-retail promotions.”
Quotient’s heritage digital couponing and promotions business makes up about $212 million of its total 2016 revenue of $275.2 million, compared to $63 million from its media business.
Quotient went public in 2014 when it was still doing business as Coupons.com (it rebranded to Quotient in 2015), raised $168 million through its IPO and topped out at a $1 billion valuation.
