• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 15, 2018

Viant Technology on Wednesday introduced an ad-targeting feature that considers how long it takes for a consumer to repurchase a product from CPG companies such as cereal, detergent and pet food before sending that targeted message.  

The company developed the targeting feature after internal research revealed that the repurchase of a product can increase by more than 26 times when messages are timed in the week prior to a typical repurchase cycle rather, compared with earlier in the cycle.

“If you purchase laundry detergent every eight weeks, than the best time to target them is during week seven,” said Jon Schulz, CMO at Viant, a people-based marketing company owned by Meredith Corporation.

Initially, the research looked into ways brands could target “fence sitters,” Schulz said, but that notion quickly transformed into repurchase cycles. It’s about predicting who to target. The study, called The Persuadables, breaks down the purchase cycles to identify the spike leading up to the purchase.

Most targeting apps follow a pattern. But the idea, Schulz said, is to encourage the consumer to do something out of the ordinary, which reinforces the need to look at individual behavior. Viant’s platform considers the product category, along with other triggers, which he declines to mention.

An expanded partnership with IRI, which supports data and analytics, makes it possible to offer the feature, along with a tool called Sales Tactic Optimization, which allows marketers throughout the campaign to better understand and track changes and budgets.

Let’s say Pepsi has a campaign during the World Cup and the brand wants to promote the product to sports enthusiasts, high spenders, and those who have purchased something in the past 30 days. The platform considers each of the three segments and how they perform, allocating more of the budget to the campaign that does best.

Viant also partnered with BevMo! to offer CPG companies specific audience segments, allowing CPG marketers related to spirits and beer the ability to target ads to audiences programmatically based on the BevMo! segments.

“There’s a lot more challenges with programmatic targeting, because you need to tie together people and their devices,” Schulz said. “Without the connective tissue, the BevMo audience segment … it would make it very difficult to reach you.”