Exclusive: Mailchimp Owner Intuit Launches Media Network for Small Businesses

  Rassegna Stampa, Social
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Intuit also owns tax filing service TurboTax and personal finance company Credit Karma, but these business lines will be separate from the media venture.

Filling a niche

Intuit is betting the small business audience could be a lucrative area to target for all kinds of advertisers, both business-to-business and business-to-consumer.

For example, it can be more efficient for CPG companies to ship products directly to shoppers if they are in bulk, and small business owners would be the ideal customers for bulk orders, Raggio said.

“If you’re trying to sell homeowners insurance, the fact that [someone] owns a small business makes it much more likely that they own a house,” said Eric Perko, founder of media agency Apollo Partners, which worked with Intuit to launch SMB MediaLabs.

Unlike a lot of traditional retail media networks that only run on O&O properties, we are running ads in environments where [buyers] are already investing

Dave Raggio, vice president acquisition marketing, Intuit

SMB MediaLabs will start as a managed service available via insertion orders. Intuit will place the buy with a demand-side platform (DSP) and any audiences are isolated to individual campaigns. In order to be able to deliver this offering, Intuit made several hires in data science. It’s also worked with agency Apollo Partners and has integrated tech from LiveRamp.

QuickBooks customer data is anonymized and aggregated, and advertisers cannot access customers’ personally identifiable information or financial data. The company is also letting customers opt out.

Getting on the media plan

The managed service offering may offer more privacy, but it could deter some buyers who want to test a new media channel easily, preferring the synergies in reporting and frequency management that come with buying directly via a DSP, said Janine Flaccavento, executive vice president of the retail, CPG and QSR vertical at Dentsu-owned data agency Merkle.

“Automation and self-serve are where some of these newer [retail media] brands find scale,” she said. “It’s easier for us buyers to test and learn, and the more the effort that has to go into that, the more it costs the brand that’s buying.”

Raggio said SMB MediaLabs is more open for buyers to test than most retail media networks by not acting as a walled garden.

“Unlike a lot of traditional retail media networks that only run on O&O properties, we are running ads in environments where [buyers] are already investing,” he said.

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