BlueKai and Information Resources, Inc. just announced a partnership that will enable consumer packaged goods manufacturers to access IRI’s offline shopping data through BlueKai and use it to target ads.
This is the first time BlueKai has built a product for CPG advertisers and their agencies/ad buyers, the company said. BlueKai’s senior director of business development Jeffrey Teng told me that by IRI’s ProScore data, companies will now be able to divide their audience based on shopper types, the kind of product they’re interested in, and the kind of brand they’re looking for.
IRI was already collecting this data but Cory Treffiletti, BlueKai’s senior vice president of marketing, said this will allow advertisers to “activate” it in a new way, eliminating waste (i.e. money spent on ads that reach an undesirable audience) and allowing advertisers to deliver a customized message to different audiences. He painted this as a broader trend of CPG marketers using this kind of data for their digital marketing.
“2012 was really a year when our job was to help people get educated on how this data can be harnessed,” Treffiletti said. “That’s changed in that we don’t have to educate them about what a DMP [data management platform] is.”
That’s not all that’s changed, he added. In the past, CPG companies relied on partners like retailers to do most of their advertising for them, but “in the last 5 to 10 years they’ve really woken up and had their eyes widened to the value of that direct customer relationship.”