LOS ANGELES, April 5, 2022 – Infillion, the leader in innovative high-impact ad solutions for CTV and high-performance programmatic campaigns, announced the launch of AttnX – an advertising product built for CTV, desktop and mobile that secures consumers’ opt-in interest and respects their time and attention before the ad experience begins. Built to bring the benefit of value-exchange consumer engagement to brands of any size, AttnX is the first of several products to be launched under the company’s new brand name, Infillion.

“AttnX builds on the company’s decade-long success delivering consumer preference through value-exchange experiences that have come of age in the era of CTV,” said Christa Carone, President, Infillion Media.

“Through advancements in our technology, AttnX opens access to our publisher network and to this unique engagement advertising for brands seeking premium distribution, guaranteed interaction, and quick creative turnarounds all at modest budgets.”

According to eMarketer, digital video viewership grew 21% between 2019 to 2022 and has sparked tremendous growth in ad-supported streaming content. However, marketers often find their advertising in ad pods with competitive brands, and consumers are frustrated with the repetitiveness of ad messages due to uncapped ad frequency, as noted in proprietary research conducted by an Ipsos study commissioned by Infillion in late 2021.

With guaranteed engagement – in contrast to industry-standard viewability that can be as short as two seconds per 30-second spot – AttnX ensures viewers interact with marketers’ messages and rewards consumers with fewer ads, creating a more actionable experience. AttnX’s low campaign minimums and turn-key offering allows brands the ability to test the power of CTV within their existing media mix.

The launch of AttnX extends Infillion’s portfolio that includes its programmatic offering, NeXt; its flagship CTV product, TrueX; and Infillion’s expansive data portfolio anchored by opt-in location data that powers Infillion’s TrueTargeting audience builder.

Infillion launched in February as the result of Gimbal’s acquisition of adtech CTV pioneer true[X] from Disney in late 2020. Both companies have been driving customer engagement with proprietary technology and first-party data since the beginning of marketing’s transformation to digital.

Read the official announcement here.

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LOS ANGELES, March 1, 2022 – Gimbal | true[X], a leader in location technology and advanced media technologies, unveiled its new corporate identity in response to accelerated growth and a renewal of its corporate vision as Infillion.

The name change signals the unification of the company’s product offerings and data capabilities following Gimbal’s acquisition of ad tech CTV pioneer true[X] from Disney in 2020. The company will now be known as Infillion—an acknowledgment of the infinite possibilities available to the agencies and brands the company serves as a result of the explosive growth in e-commerce and digital media.

In 2021, the company focused on delivering enhanced technology and services to its customers, which includes more than 1,000 brands, and extended its strong relationships with all the major advertising holding companies and agencies. As a result, Infillion experienced 32% YOY growth in 2021.

The acceleration of digital transformation in all sectors has made it possible for infinite touchpoints between brands and customers, as US retail e-commerce grew to more than $1 trillion for the first time, and digital media grew 38% to $211B. Infillion simplifies a brand’s ability to deliver value and convenience throughout the customer experience via Infillion’s location-based technology product, Gimbal, which provides data-driven digital experiences that connect people to places, and in its media portfolio centered around advanced data solutions, especially CTV, via TrueX and its programmatic suite, now called Next.

Most recently, the company launched its TrueTargeting™ feature which makes it possible to connect first-party location data, behavioral and viewership data in every major business sector and across all screens. TrueTargeting increases brand relevance and customer engagement, improving the value exchange between consumers and brands.

“The race for attention is growing exponentially as the digital economy accelerates, providing a unique opportunity for Infillion to become synonymous with the powerful value exchanges that enhance the relationship between brands and their customers,” said Scott Dillon, CEO. “Infillion, and our evolved positioning, perfectly illustrates our growing ambition in the market and how we will drive measurable impact for our clients and businesses.”

“The race for attention is growing exponentially as the digital economy accelerates, providing a unique opportunity for Infillion to become synonymous with the powerful value exchanges that enhance the relationship between brands and their customers.”
– Scott Dillon, CEO

The advertising industry has benefited greatly from advances in technology over the past several years, but none more dramatically than during the pandemic—an environment that demands a much deeper connection between advertising, customer experiences, and commerce. Infillion aims to make that experience as seamless and intuitive as possible for consumers.

“We were excited to see true[X] join forces with Gimbal, enhancing their offering to address the growing reality that consumer attention is under assault,” said Doug Rozen, CEO, dentsu Media, Americas. “Combining high-quality advertising across desktop, mobile, and connected TV with incredibly precise location data has become more critical than ever.”

The advertising industry has benefited greatly from advances in technology over the past several years, but none more dramatically than those that occurred during the pandemic — an environment that demands a much deeper connection between advertising, customer experiences, and commerce. Infillion aims to make that experience as seamless and intuitive as possible for consumers.

“In a world where technology is expanding faster than marketers can keep up, Infillion aims to make life easier for our clients by connecting their customers more directly, and by demonstrating that a brand cares about consumers’ time, attention and privacy. If we can’t do that, then technology hasn’t advanced as much as we think it has, despite all the innovation,” said Laurel Rossi, CMO Infillion.

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​​About Infillion

Infillion is on a mission to fulfill the promise of connected consumer experiences at scale via media and technology. Infillion leverages the company’s groundbreaking TrueX engagement platform—the first value exchange tool for CTV that uses consumer choice to deliver real human attention, the Gimbal platform—which delivers authentic shopping behaviors via location data, and the company’s proprietary identity graph, XGraph, which maps actionable and predictive connected experiences.

Infillion provides full-service media solutions to agencies and brands, engages in proprietary relationships with partners and publishers, and facilitates outstanding consumer experiences that are superior to conventional interruptive advertising models. Infillion deeply values consumers’ time, attention, and privacy, and puts a premium on employee satisfaction, talent development, and exemplary leadership.

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Not long ago, software was sold in a box. Literally.

If you wanted to use Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop on your computer, you would drive to a store, pay for the contents inside a cardboard box, bring it home, install it via floppy disk or CD-ROM on your PC, enter a license number, and you were up and running.

And that’s where the journey typically ended.

No updates. No communication with the company that developed the software. Limited customer support.

From the business’s end, there was little opportunity to understand how people were using the software or identify ways to improve it. There was a product launch with a (mostly) one-time lump of revenue and an expected 1- to 5-year gap until the next release was ready – and that was assuming the software was good enough to convince the customer to come back in a few years and buy the updated version.

But in the early 2000s, a (then) small company called Concur had the idea of bringing their software online.

By distributing their software over the internet, they were able to provide ongoing value, support, and upgrades to customers while simultaneously transitioning their revenue to a more consistent stream. The rest, as they say, is history. The company was acquired 13 years later by SAP for $8.3 billion on $600 million of recurring revenue. Most software today is distributed over the web by companies who charge on a monthly and/or recurring method.

I believe retail is getting ready to go through a similar renaissance of its own.

Here’s why…

“People do business with people who they know, like, and trust.”

This old sales adage still stands true. But when it was uttered previously, it was based on personal, one-on-one interactions at the flower shop or the local car lot. The ability for an individual salesperson to remember your daughter’s name or where you went for vacation last year can only scale linearly. And frankly, soft skills aren’t what move products in today’s digitally-focused world of commerce.

Today, I believe brands have the ability to know their customers far better than any individual salesperson could, which sets the brands themselves up to be liked and trusted by customers at scale.

The crucial ingredient that makes this possible is – of course – data.

It’s the same ingredient that enables software developers to understand the usage of their product, iterate quickly, and ship code changes in near real-time to their browser-based software to the benefit of their customers now to capture future value. And as I explained in a previous post about building a digital flywheel, data is what will fuel commerce given the deep links between the physical and digital worlds.

In short, data allows smart organizations to generate future revenues. Better data, better experiences, more consistent revenues, higher valuations.

The LTV of a Retail Customer – and Why It Matters

If you ask a good marketer or business leader in the software-as-a-service space (SaaS) what their CLTV (customer lifetime value) is, they will be able to tell you. They’ll also be able to tell you if that LTV is going up or down over time. LTV helps businesses understand how much they can afford to pay to acquire new customers and how long the payback period is until they recoup their investment to acquire that new customer.

Secondly, cohorts – groups of new customers within the same time range – help explain satisfaction and retention based on the state of the product or service at the time they joined. Cohorts help quantitatively answer questions like:

• “Is our product offering strong? Is it getting better or worse?”
• “How sticky is our product based on the improvements we just made?”
• “Are there other competitors/market forces that are impacting the LTV of our customers?”
• “Are we building the right features?”
• “Are our customers getting more value from our product(s) over time?”
• “Are our customers leaving and then coming back?”
• “Are we delivering our product or service as seamlessly as we could?”

The reward for delivering an indispensable experience to your customer is an ongoing, predictable stream of future revenues.

This business model isn’t just reserved for SaaS companies, either. We have seen companies like Disney (Disney+), Rent the Runway (Memberships), Netflix, The New York Times, Peloton (Membership), Dollar Shave Club and others latch onto the concept of providing ongoing value in exchange for a monthly fee.

The “rundle” (recurring-revenue subscription model + bundle), as Professor Scott Galloway puts it, is where countless industries are heading. The race is on to provide so much value to your customers by bundling adjacent products and services at an affordable monthly price they couldn’t dream of shopping anywhere else.

The Future Retail Is RaaS (Retail-as-a-Service)

In its most simple view, retailers have relied on 1) physical stores that serve local markets and 2) their selection of products within a specific niche or vertical to attract local customers for the past 20+ years.

But the shift to digital has eroded both of these legacy moats.

At-home delivery has become nearly ubiquitous. Changing preferences means consumers are more likely to order products that they’ve never physically seen or held before. Digital commerce also means near-infinite shelf space. Now that consumers have an endless array of options to choose from, are retailers really going to compete by touting the broadest or most unique selection on their shelves? My guess is no.

The future is data-powered production and distribution. By knowing your customers – both individually and in aggregate – brands and manufacturers have the ability to understand what they want, know what they’ve bought and liked in the past, and recommend what they’ll want or need in the future.

What’s more is that digital-first retailers will be able to build obsolescence into their business model and amortize it over the lifetime value of a customer. Rather than wondering if or when a customer will return, hoping they manufactured enough of the right SKUs, and carrying huge amounts of inventory, they can deliver value in the form of a monthly/quarterly/annual rotation of goods that fits their customers’ needs at that time.

The post Why the Future of Retail Starts and Ends with LTV appeared first on Infillion.

For example, most restaurants, grocery stores, QSRs, and retailers don’t know who their customers are, even if they shop or dine there on multiple occasions. The anonymity of cash- (and even credit)-based transactions impede their ability to enhance the customer experience over time. The result is a mass market, one-size-fits-most approach to selling their goods.

The keyword in that second-to-last sentence is “transactions.” Without the ability to know who your customer is and connect data points over time, the relationship remains transactional. In the technology space, we know and understand the value of non-transactional (i.e. recurring or subscription) revenue. Why should more traditional businesses be any different?

I believe most companies can make the transition from transactional to more stable (and valuable), recurring revenue businesses if they focus on two key factors:

1. Owning the Customer Relationship
2. Digitizing Everything

Owning the Customer Relationship

Historically, knowing your customers meant actually knowing them: seeing them face-to-face, knowing their names, remembering things about their families, and memorizing their orders. This approach can work for small businesses but likely isn’t scalable for regional or national chains – especially in a post-pandemic world when most customers still aren’t going indoors.

Asking diners to drop their business cards in a fishbowl at the bar, adding a popup to acquire website visitors’ email addresses, or putting the mailing addresses of deliveries onto a physical mail distro scaled the approach. By building a list, businesses had a way to communicate en masse with their customers.

Today, owning the relationship is more complicated – but also more important – than ever before. There are countless owned and earned channels that prospects and customers can interact through: website, social platforms, mobile app, marketplaces, retailers (if you’re a manufacturer or brand), and more.

In my opinion, owning the customer relationship means two things:

• Making your owned and operated channels the easiest and best experience for your customers
• Working toward always logged-in experiences on those channels

Marketplaces and aggregators like GrubHub, Zillow, Doordash, OpenTable, and Expedia have long understood the value of the login. By knowing who their customers are, marketplaces are able to monitor usage, make recommendations, generate more data, and personalize each individual’s experience over time.

As Nick Kokonas, founder of the Alinea Group and CEO of Tock, puts it:

“OpenTable wants to own that relationship because that’s how they monetize it… yet I don’t know [which customer is coming in tonight.] I don’t know that your wife is left handed and likes tea. I don’t know that you’ve been to my other five restaurants 22 times because each restaurant is siloed as its own server.”

Once logged in, how can brands, retailers, restaurants, and grocers truly get to know their customers?

Digitizing Everything

At Gimbal, we have long been in the business of digitizing the physical world. And in that way, pieces like this can seem very self-serving.

However, fast-growth companies who are not (yet) Gimbal clients understand the value of digitizing their offerings, generating data, and providing frictionless experiences. In fact, they are key strategies for up-and-coming brands like Sweetgreen and proven players like McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Amazon.

As Sweetgreen CEO, Jonathan Neman, put it in a recent interview:

“You’ve got to give the consumer more and more reasons to transact digitally. And the reason we do it is because the combination of the digital relationship and the frictionless experience it provides, as well as the food that we serve, is just by its nature, habitual – because it’s healthy. Once we have you within the ecosystem, you go from a once in a while guest to pretty much a subscriber. It’s not a subscription yet; one day it can be.”

Today, 80% of Sweetgreen’s business is digital. That means for every five orders that are made, four of them are either placed online, through their app, or purchased in-store using their “Scan to Pay” functionality.

The result? A trail of breadcrumbs in the form of data for each individual customer that describes the relationship with the brand over time:

• What was ordered?
• When was it ordered?
• Where was it ordered?
• What ingredients were selected/left off their order?
• What dietary restrictions does this user have?
• Have they been more or less active lately?
• Have they ordered at multiple locations?

Data Powers Personalization

Imagine a scenario where you go into a Subway restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska today and another Subway in Trenton, New Jersey tomorrow. Both sandwich artists who prepare your meal – without asking – know that you like Italian Herb & Cheese bread and light mayo but hate tomatoes.

Now scale this experience across millions of customers and 45,000 locations around the country. Doing it “the current way” seems unrealistic because it is.

Problems like this are solvable and scalable with digital solutions, however.

McDonald’s understands this. “Digital” is one of the Three D’s in their growth strategy to become the leading omnichannel restaurant in all their markets. This focus on digital – the output of which is data – is also the reason they acquired Dynamic Yield in late 2019. The technology optimizes offerings on their exterior digital ordering systems based on each store’s local weather data. Not rocket science, but also impactful enough to justify the $300 million price tag.

The Shift from Transactional to LTV

Traditional retailers and QSRs market to get customers to walk into their stores, make a purchase, and then hope they’ll be back again. The whereabouts, browsing and buying habits, and buying history of their customers remain unknown until the next time they stop by.

Loyalty cards bridge that gap a bit but most generally track buying behavior over time. They still leave a significant gap in understanding the customer journey as not all visitors are customers, and not all customers are store visitors these days.

Companies like Rent the Runway – typically thought of as a clothing company – is mostly a data and technology company. Per Jennifer Hyman, in a 2018 interview:

“Rent the Runway is very much a technology business and always has been. In fact, 80% of our corporate employees are engineers, data scientists, product managers. We have very few people that are in what you would think are the traditional aspects of what Rent the Runway would be doing, which is merchandising and marketing. The first C-level hire that I made was a chief data officer, and he was in my first 10 employees. So from the very beginning of the company, we were thinking about data.”

Rent the Runway employs more developers and data scientists than stylists because the fashion decisions that are being made are based on data being generated by their current customers.
The takeaway: What started as a transactional business (“rent this dress for a single event”) evolved into a subscription model where customers can get up to 16 items per month for under $200.
Other companies have made the digital leap as well and are being rewarded for their efforts.

• Nike, formerly reliant on retailers as their main distribution channel, is shifting toward a DTC strategy.
• Disney previously monetized their massive content library via licensing agreements with cable companies, Netflix, and others. Today, that library is worth substantially more via subscription fees on Disney+.
• Starbucks’ 360-degree digital strategy (Wifi access, payments, marketing analytics, loyalty) has paid off in spades and now boasts one of the strongest loyalty programs in the country. As we mentioned in our latest whitepaper, the growth of Starbucks’ mobile app has represented a growing percentage of the company’s quarterly sales since its launch in Q1 2016.

The Digital Commerce Flywheel

This isn’t e-commerce. It is digitally-enabled commerce. The difference is that e-commerce assumes the sale is being made online. But today’s consumers don’t differentiate between the digital and physical worlds anymore. The phygital landscape allows them to shift between the two and decide which combination best fits their research, ordering, and fulfillment needs.

The canonical example of digitally-enabled commerce (a brand owning a relationship to generate more data and improve the experience) is Amazon. Today, traditional retailers with massive physical footprints like Walmart continue to flex their muscle and expand their digital offerings. Five months after launching Walmart+, data suggests subscribers to the new service hovers around 8 million. By becoming a go-to resource for customers, the brands who maintain customer mindshare, trust, and have a reliable method to deliver their offering to their customers will win.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword, it’s the “buzzworld” we are living in. Retailers are no longer in the business of traditional commerce; they are in the business of digitally-enabled commerce.

Companies new and old, traditional and digitally-native, product and media-focused, manufacturing and retail-based all have the ability to apply this framework to their business. The results will be profound. In the same way that Amazon has absorbed much of the market’s attention and demand, the grounds for niche brands and retailers to thrive remain fertile. The more customers you know, the more shots your organization will have on goal. The more data you have, the more learnings you’ll be exposed to. And the faster those learnings are applied, the more successful the company stands to be.

The post How to Build a Digital Commerce Flywheel appeared first on Infillion.

According to eMarketer, online grocery sales are expected to exceed $100 billion for the first time this year – and it’s not likely to slow down, even after vaccinations. By next year, eMarketer expects more than half of the U.S. population will be online grocery buyers. And by 2023, online grocery sales are estimated to hit 11.2% of total U.S. grocery sales. Like they say in the book, “if you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.” In other words, once consumers get a taste of convenience, they’re going to ask for more.

Additionally, according to 1010data’s State of Grocery Report, online grocery and grocery delivery services accounted for 8% of annual grocery spend by the end of 2019. But by April 2020 – just a month after shoppers were forced online – grocery delivery surged by 527%.

Exciting and encouraging times if you’re a technologist, digital marketer, or food delivery company. Not so much if you’re a grocer, where 17 of the top 20 major grocers scored lower than just a year before.

Why? The latest Retail and Consumer Satisfaction Report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows the story may not be as rosy as it seems on the customer side. The 2021 report found that customer satisfaction dropped across nearly every retail vertical, but grocers were hit especially hard last year.

In fact, twelve of the 13 metrics measured in the report (from “Ability to offer brand names” to “Quality/reliability of mobile app”) were down, leading to a -2.6% decrease in satisfaction across the sector.

The takeaway? Running a grocery chain is tough. It’s even harder when a pandemic is surging, supply chains are disrupted, and sales channels shift overnight. Add in stricter compliance and regulatory guidelines, and it’s no wonder most brands are struggling to meet customer expectations.

Retailers across verticals scrambled to get temporary and, often, piecemeal solutions in place in 2020. Recently, we’ve been talking to clients and prospects who are now starting to plan for and implement more sustainable programs to keep up with ongoing customer expectations.

What do your 2021 plans look like? Is there anything you’re doing to specifically address your customers’ contactless and curbside pickup solutions?

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