• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, October 24, 2022

Publishers Clearing House (PCH), a digital entertainment and commerce destination, recently launched PCH Audiences. The offering is made possible through PCH Media.

The audience segments -- which leverage the company’s nearly 70 years of expertise in data -- are built from signals collected about the 170 million people who have participated in PCH’s free-to-play and chance-to-win experiences.

PCH isolated the 54 million users who are most likely to buy, click, convert and share data and packaged them into hundreds of audience segments. Then the company aligned them in terms of how brands target users across the web. 

This includes permissioned age, gender and address data as well as household, purchase, interest, vehicle, and lifestyle segments.

PCH Audiences provides marketers with direct access to these registered and known users through almost any direct or programmatic buying channel that marketers use today. The feature allows brands to reach consumers wherever they are across the open web.

The data focuses on characteristics of heads of households who are more likely to be in their prime earning years. It includes highly active spenders who consume and take action online. This audience was previously only accessible on PCH’s owned-and-operated properties, but now it is available across all leading buying platforms.

“PCH identifies active spenders as those who are most likely to convert based on their past purchase activity on PCH’s digital entertainment and commerce properties,” says Bill Masterson, president of PCH Media.

Masterson says the process meets compliance guidelines. Developers at the company have spent a lot of time addressing privacy.

“In designing the program, we have been privacy-centric to assure that member data is gathered in a transparent and fully compliant manner,” he says. “Consumers are given the ability to opt out of data sharing, and all personally identifiable information is secured in our central 'data bunker'.'

PCH -- a company that dates back to 1953 -- uses anonymized tokens to protect the identity of members, who always have the ability to opt out of that token process, he said.

Marketers can activate PCH audiences through all major programmatic exchanges.

“We aggregated over 5,000 signals to create audience roll-ups that align to segments brands want to buy,” Masterson says.

PCH has used data profiling, segmentation, and data-driven marketing for decades with a focus on privacy.

Imagine allowing Amazon, an ecommerce company, to target the 54 million most valuable Prime members.  PCH Audiences is PCH’s equivalent to that, but for any approved marketer.

Early tests showed that audiences outperformed other publisher-provided audiences by up to 3X on conversion rate, click-through rate, and cost-per-click efficiency.