ChoiceStream Launches CRUNCH, Industry’s First Custom Audience Platform

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Cambridge, MA – ChoiceStream®, an innovator in online personalized marketing solutions for major brands, launched CRUNCH, the first custom audience advertising platform that uses proprietary consumer intent and conversion behavior to predict how audiences will react to brand messages. Building on ChoiceStream’s 10 years of harnessing customer data to predict and drive marketing performance, the new platform will allow brands to find qualified prospects regardless of where they are online, helping advertisers find well-qualified reach in the most cost-efficient way. CRUNCH combines a rich, proprietary database of consumer intentions from partners with select sources of behavioral data to customize the audience most likely to respond to the advertiser’s display ad campaign.

CRUNCH is the only advertising platform that is focused on audience targeting at the individual level, going well beyond the practice of targeting to pre-defined commercially available segments.  CRUNCH creates custom audiences of individually-selected consumers who are best suited for the particular campaign. Targeting gets smarter with each ad response; individuals enter and leave CRUNCH’s custom audience segment as their intentions and interests change allowing CRUNCH to persistently optimize to the most responsive consumers.

In a variety of beta tests, CRUNCH delivered extraordinary results. For example 3,100 new, pre-qualified shoppers were delivered to one client’s shopping cart, in less than 60 days. In another test, on average, new registrants sent to a client via CRUNCH spent 35% more on their subsequent purchases,  and in a third test, CRUNCH lowered a client’s cost to engage new shoppers by 30% and lastly,  CRUNCH provided a 73% percent higher click through rate from another’s client’s prior baseline.

“The CRUNCH platform takes performance of online display advertising to a new level, and bridges the gap between brands and consumers,” says Steve Johnson, CEO, ChoiceStream. “CRUNCH replaces the imprecise practice of guessing an advertiser’s target audience with a fully automated means of using up-to-the-minute consumer intent data to help brands discover their perfect audience, the only service that can do this today.”

CRUNCH offers a full service, easy-to-use solution to agencies and advertisers that eliminates the burden of manually configuring audience targets, sourcing media and tracking performance.  CRUNCH provides audience analytics that reveal to advertisers undiscovered audiences, and provides insights they can apply across their integrated marketing programs.  To expand its unique data footprint, CRUNCH has integrated with selected data management platforms, such as AlmondNet Data Division and eXelate.  Because CRUNCH is integrated with AppNexus, it has the option to use real-time bidding to get the inventory and ad serving necessary for large-scale campaigns.

“Because we manage a campaign from completed creative to delivery of final results, one might call CRUNCH a ‘custom audience targeting platform.’   Unlike DSPs, we have our own algorithms that allow us to optimize audiences for our client’s specific campaigns which learn and improve as our client keeps using our platform,” adds Mr. Johnson. “We also provide detailed audience analysis – what types of people saw and responded to the campaign – at the end of each campaign as part of our service. No other company provides the full-service audience targeting and back end reporting that CRUNCH does.”

“When you have great data like ChoiceStream your ability to deliver an effective brand message goes up,” says Colin W. Gillis, Director of Research and Senior Technology Analyst at BGC Financial, L.P. “And I like that the best data is kept proprietary.”

CRUNCH works closely with its clients to improve their return on ad spend by optimizing campaign performance to the engagement or conversion events that advertisers care most about.  CRUNCH is available to brand and direct response advertisers across all vertical markets.

ChoiceStream, Inc. (www.choicestream.com) is an innovator in online advertising and personalized marketing solutions. For more than ten years, companies like AT&T, Zappos, Tesco, Ticketmaster and MTV have relied on ChoiceStream to create a more engaging, personally relevant experience for their consumers.  By transforming shopping behavior and media consumption into intelligence about a consumer’s unique preferences, ChoiceStream is able to help today’s biggest brands target their most qualified prospects with the right advertisement, email promotion and product recommendations to improve brand engagement, conversion rates and customer loyalty.