AdWeek

Nielsen has partnered with digital coupon specialist RevTrax to bolster Nielsen Marketing Cloud, which can now help clients create offers that should, in theory, generate more sales.

The chief concept is to take the cloud's machine-learning and data-modeling technologies—that continuously tweak ad creative and offers as new data rolls in from across the web—and combine them with RevTrax's SmartOffers. The latter software personalizes online coupons that consumers can load on their smartphones, add to loyalty cards, print out at home, etc. 

Consumer packaged goods giant Kimberly-Clark is the first client to utilize the new applications in Nielsen Marketing Cloud. When a consumer visits a Kimberly-Clark website, RevTrax's ad server pings the cloud to access Nielsen's consumer data, such as purchase history, before employing such data to serve a targeted coupon. The coded offer is captured by the cloud after a purchase occurs, even if it happens in a brick-and-mortar store. The cloud feeds a stream of instructions to RevTrax SmartOffers based on the incoming sales and engagement data, and consumer segments are constantly updated. The brand marketer's own data trove is in the mix, too. So, in effect, it's a meshing of first-party and third-party data to attempt to achieve—in industry parlance— "one-to-one marketing." A/B testing, a direct-response mainstay tactic, is also an integral part of the whole idea. 

"CPG is a very strong vertical for [us]," explained Damian Garbaccio, global chief commercial officer, Nielsen Marketing Cloud. "But it can be applied to all verticals." 

The RevTrax partnership builds on Nielsen's efforts in the last couple of years to build a marketing cloud that strongly competes with Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and IBM. For instance, Nielsen bought media planning software company PointLogic in March, and it purchased data-management technology platform and exchange eXelate about a year earlier. Both acquirees have been absorbed into Nielsen Marketing Cloud. 

The long game entails offering programmatic solutions for everything from digital couponing and behavioral retargeting to TV advertising. Garbaccio mentioned the measurement capabilities Nielsen has in mind when it comes to programmatic television while pointing to his company's continued focus on marketing powered by artificial intelligence. 

"It's the same dynamic we would provide in digital," he said. "It could be with a Turner [Broadcasting] or a DirecTV. As long as they have the ability to match back the IDs to households or an individual ... [marketers] can test offers."

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