Master evolving third-party data. Our guide with Datonics debunks misconceptions, offers insights for data selection and respects privacy. Download now.
Financial services giant Intuit is launching a small business-focused media network, letting advertisers target customers across the web and tapping into a new revenue line, executives exclusively told Adweek.
The venture, called SMB MediaLabs, will let advertisers target the customers of accounting firm QuickBooks on a range of digital media properties, including audio, online publishers, social platforms like Meta, and connected TV. Intuit is working with Vizio as its exclusive CTV partner. QuickBooks had 7.1 million customers at the end of the fiscal year 2022.
Small business owners use QuickBooks to help manage their accounting and pay employees, among other tasks. Intuit also owns email marketing business Mailchimp, whose customers the company plans to eventually make available to advertisers for targeting, said Dave Raggio, vice president of U.S. acquisition marketing for Intuit’s small business and self-employed group.
“There are not that many good small-business data sources,” Raggio said, noting many data sources on small businesses come from government sources or are scraped from the web, making them less up-to-date and inaccurate. “I just looked at what we had and noticed that we could provide a lot of value for other advertisers that were trying to reach this audience.”
Intuit joins a growing number of corporations, often retailers, that have been retooling themselves as media networks in response to the proliferation of digital interfaces and the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, which has made advertisers hungry for new sources of first-party data. The bet has paid off: Retail media will attract $45 billion in U.S. ad spend this year, a 20% year-over-year increase, per Insider Intelligence.
Most entrants into the space start by serving ads on their e-commerce websites, including Marriott, a non-retailer that launched a media network last year. By contrast, SMB MediaLabs will not start by serving ads on its owned and operated (O&O) properties but on other digital channels.
Hailing from the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) world, Raggio joined Intuit to market QuickBooks to small business owners. The challenges Raggio faced there spurred the idea for SMB MediaLabs.
“The creep of the scope is not novel, but the focus is,” said Nikhil Lai, senior analyst of performance marketing at Forrester, of the rise of commerce media.