ShopAdvisor Makes Its Proximity Marketing Platform More Intelligent

ShopAdvisor, provider of a proximity marketing platform for retailers, has released new intelligence tools that allow brands to reach customers on mobile devices with more relevant messages, while attracting them to stores and making purchases more likely.  

In North America, companies spend "$50 billion on advertising on an annual basis, and frankly, most of it is spent in fairly frivolous and ineffective ways," says Jeff Papows, chief executive officer of ShopAdvisor. "At the same time, more than 90 percent of the commerce experience still happens in the physical, brick-and- mortar location. Creating an analytical degree of intelligence that takes advantage of the propensity for that $50 billion to move to the handset—where we not only have proximity intelligence, but access to people in the real physical world, [as well as] product and inventory intelligence—it's just something that's finally reached its time."

ShopAdvisor's platform draws on contextual information to target customers with personalized mobile marketing messages—including banners and push notifications—with the goal of driving in-store traffic for brick-and-mortar retailers. The latest release leverages capabilities the company inherited with its acquisition of Retailigence in April and includes Product, Context, and Shopper Intelligence features.

Product Intelligence consumes information from hundreds of sources—including ShopAdvisor's retail and data partners—and classifies product data according to their categories. Papows points out that the platform has access to metadata connected to more than 200 million products across more than 200,000 physical retail outlets, and so the tool can enhance campaigns by giving customers specific information about those products according to their interests and purchase behaviors, which could be stored in that company's mobile application, for instance.

The platform's Context Intelligence feature allows it to gather and catalog "millions" of data points relating to product availability, the local stores that have them in stock, and products that are popular at the moment or are being advertised in different magazines or Web sites.

Shopper Intelligence reacts to signals from consumer interactions with brands and products. The technology, used in hundreds of magazines (including Cosmopolitan and Newsweek, among others), mobile apps, and Web sites, can gather insights into customers and segments and more accurately guess their preferences for certain brands or product categories, their goals and budgets, and the best times to reach out to them with tailored offers.

ShopAdvisor has been making additions to its partner ecosystem, Papows notes. The company offers appNET, a network where independent mobile app developers can offer supplementary shopping apps, some of which focus on product discovery, digital catalogues, and social shopping. The appNET API allows retailers to add product details and store information into mobile search results, which can increase the likelihood that customers who are looking for a product in a specific store will know for certain they can find it there.

One of ShopAdvisor's goals is to collect signals from different apps and give retailers even more information about their buyers. "The larger the number of apps we're ingesting, the more broad the audience we can light up in the physical world at any given point in time," Papow says.

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