• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 12, 2016

Publishers Clearing House (PCH), best known for its surprise sweepstakes prizes, has rebranded its ad tech business from Liquid to PCH/Media, effective Tuesday.

The company wants to make a name for itself in the ad-tech world. Steve Bagdasarian, GM at PCH/Media, the rebranded PCH company, says the legacy name Liquid Wireless -- acquired with the acquisition in 2011 -- created confusion as to how "deeply intertwined" the advertising and media solutions tied to the PCH brand.

"We model core behavior to understand consumer motivations," Bagdasarian said. "It provides insights from everything to how often they purchase products from Wal-Mart to their favorite sports teams."

Jason John, PCH CMO, said that in gaming and entertainment "we see a lot of cool behavioral shifts like the shift to mobile, even in the older demographics."

The data -- collected from customers opting-in to participate in the PCH games, as well as periodic surveys about reasons they might purchase a product -- powers the publisher's digital advertising products across its sites. It's also the data the publisher uses to build audience segments for advertisers, allowing them to take it to other networks.

Giving advertising access to the data produces nearly 80% viewability rates on PCH's ad inventory across its network of sites, 85% completion rate on video, as well as 90% on-target delivery, according to Bagdasarian, citing stats from Nielsen DAR.

Advertising have the ability to buy the media and associate the data with the media to use on PCH sites, but they also have the option to build audience models and use the data on other sites.

Most advertisers are looking for data to create leads and app downloads, as well as shopper and retail brands that leverage the data to target consumer behavior, Bagdasarian said.

The data comes from about 100 million U.S. households -- about 73% of all U.S. households, Bagdasarian estimates. There are hundreds of pieces of data. PCH averages about 20 million monthly unique, with an 83% to 87% retention rate.

PCH is considered by comScore data to be a top digital U.S. game publisher, "free to play, chance to win," selling nearly $1 billion in products annually. Spurring the growth, it's integration of demand-side platform capabilities (DSP) through its acquisition of Plethora Mobile and capabilities in CRM automation the acquisition of CommandIQ.