Summary

More than 75% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations and are ready to switch to brands who can do this. Living up to those expectations and creating moments of serendipitous discovery that spark action takes far more than solid audience targeting and media selection. It requires these four components:




1. Signal Interpretation

Consumers’ lives and online patterns are rich with signals that paint a picture of interests and needs. Using these signals to understand how to best match marketing to immediate needs requires a lot of data and a healthy tech stack. Predicting intent requires the ability to understand interests, desires, readiness to buy, browsing and shopping patterns, and even knowledge of where people go each day. All of these variables create a mosaic to help determine intent and openness to offers and marketing messages.

The Valassis Consumer Graph™ connects online and offline signals to build a detailed picture of consumers’ lives, including what they want to buy and the interests that drive that intent. Using patented analyses, predictive intelligence, and rich text mining on over 110 billion signals every day, Valassis Digital paints a picture of long- and short-term interest and intent.

2. Engagement Precision

It’s not enough to know that the consumer is in the market to buy. Real breakthrough campaigns require specifically reaching those individuals and motivating action in meaningful ways. That means knowing who to target as well as how and where to reach them in their moments of interest for the optimal response.

The Valassis Consumer Graph™ collects 33 billion daily location signals across 1.4 billion unique devices to understand and to map where individuals live, shop, work, and play. This combined intent and location intelligence fuels the Valassis Intent Engine™ enabling us to match the right consumers with the ideal creative/device combination for optimal engagement.

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3. Insight-to-Ad Friction Reduction

Timing is everything. Late ad delivery—post purchase or after interest has waned—only serves to irritate consumers and waste media dollars. Unfortunately, late delivery is the norm when audience insights get transferred by a third-party data provider to a DSP for activating digital advertising. Often, that lag can be as long as 10 days. To maximize their opportunity, marketers must reduce this friction between insight and ad.

At Valassis Digital, we know in near real-time that someone is ready to buy. And because our Intent Engine serves as both a DMP and a DSP, we can target and reach the ideal consumer in milliseconds. That means there’s no drop off between identifying the right people with intent to buy and executing targeted digital ads to them.

4. Insight Amplification

The people you know best are usually the ones you’ve known the longest. That knowledge can be powerful, driving more meaningful interactions. But marketers are often at a disadvantage in this regard because they usually have to manage data and media via separate platforms. While they expect to optimize digital ad campaigns in-flight for optimal performance, the nuances of consumer behaviors tend to get lost from campaign to campaign.

At Valassis Digital, we give marketers a unified Intent Engine, with all of the parts working together. As a fully-connected engine fueled by machine learning models, we learn about audience preferences and media responses for the benefit of future campaigns. Certainly, each campaign gets direct and immediate feedback from our artificial intelligence, but the consumer never stands still, so neither does the insight, nor the ability to constantly improve the experience and drive campaign performance.

Predicting consumer intent, and having the ability to act on predictive intelligence in real time to engage consumers and deliver value, gives marketers a powerful edge. Yet, the old ways of modeling the future based on data on separate platforms simply don’t cut it.

With the Valassis Intent Engine™, modern marketers can pinpoint latent drivers of intent and leverage advanced machine-learning approaches to connect with consumers at incredibly precise moments of interest and openness.