Quotient Technology Profile
Quotient Technology Inc. (Quotient) operates as an industry leading promotions and media technology company that delivers targeted digital promotions and media for advertisers and retailers to reach consumers and drive action.
The company’s customers consist primarily of consumer-packaged goods (‘CPG’) companies and their brand marketers (together referred to as ‘advertisers’) who want to drive sales and positive brand engagement with shoppers. The company’s digital marketing platform is designed to produce returns on marketing investment for advertisers by utilizing consumer behavior, intent data and point of sale (‘POS’) data to deliver the right marketing message and call-to-action to the right consumer at the right time, through multiple touchpoints while consumers are engaged online, out of home and in-store.
The company partners with retailers, who primarily sell products through physical stores and eCommerce properties, as well as non-retailer publisher websites and other properties. The company is primarily focused on the U.S.-based grocery retail market and the advertisers who sell products through that channel, and the company is expanding its platform to verticals outside of the grocery retail space.
By partnering with Quotient, retailers can monetize their proprietary sales data and offer effective marketing opportunities for their brand partners to engage consumers across multiple touchpoints, including through their owned and operated properties, as well as offsite media ad inventory, with the intention of achieving higher sales through their physical stores and eCommerce sites.
The company’s network includes the digital properties of its retail partners, non-retail publisher partners and CPG customers, social media platforms, digital out-of-home (‘DOOH’) properties, and the company’s consumer brand, Shopmium. This network provides Quotient with proprietary and licensed data, including retailers' POS shopper data, first-party consumer behavior and purchase intent data, and location intelligence. With such data powering the company’s platforms, customers and partners use Quotient to leverage consumer insights, target and engage consumers via digital channels, and integrate marketing and merchandising programs to drive measurable sales results and consumer engagement.
The company’s network is made up of several different constituencies:
The company’s advertiser customers consist of approximately 800 CPGs, representing over 2,100 brands, including some of the leading food, beverage, personal care and household product manufacturers;
The company’s retail partners represent multiple classes of trade and verticals, such as grocery retailers, drug, automotive, mass merchant, dollar, club, and convenience merchandise channels, where most CPGs' products are sold;
The company’s publisher partners who invest in online consumer engagement and who help the company to increase its network's reach to more U.S. shoppers; and
Millions of consumers who visit the company’s owned websites, mobile properties and social channels, as well as those of the company’s CPGs, retailer partners and other network partners.
The company delivers targeted and/or personalized digital promotions and media to shoppers through the company’s network using shopper data from its retail partners, as well as proprietary data from the company’s audience segments.
The company delivers targeted and/or personalized digital promotions and media to shoppers through the company’s network using shopper data from the company’s retail partners, as well as proprietary data from the company’s audience segments. The company’s solutions help its customers and partners optimize the performance of their digital marketing campaigns as they continue to shift more of their marketing spend from traditional to digital channels. The company’s platforms measure performance by attribution of digital campaigns to retail purchases in near real time, demonstrating return on spend for the company’s customers and partners.
The company’s promotions products include digital rebates, load-to-card loyalty offers, and digital print and paperless coupons. The company’s media solutions include display, social, DOOH, Retailer.com display and sponsored search, shoppable event pages, and audience segments. A growing number of campaigns that the company’s customers purchase are integrated campaigns, which combine a mix of digital promotions and/or media solutions within a single campaign.
Platforms and Solutions
The company offers technology and solutions that power integrated digital promotions and media campaigns for brands and retailers. The company’s platforms enable its customers to plan, buy and execute measurable campaigns that target key shopper audiences to drive profitable sales, build loyalty and increase brand awareness and affinity. In the company’s view, the scale of the company’s network, its rich first and second party data, and the company’s programmatic technology—which offer omnichannel execution, brand safety, and efficiency and transparency of ad buying—provide competitive differentiators and a strong foundation for driving profitable and sustainable growth.
To fully leverage the power of the company’s network and to drive focused execution, the company has aligned its organization around four key product families, each representing a distinct growth opportunity. The four key product areas are promotions, direct-to-consumer (‘DTC’), Retail Ad Network, and DOOH.
Promotions
The company’s promotions business consists of a broad network of consumer touchpoints across the company’s retailer and publisher properties, as well as the company’s DTC app through which the company delivers savings to consumers. The company continues to scale its network through building on existing partnerships, and securing new partnerships, which represents growth potential as the company offers consumers convenient ways to find value wherever they spend time and however they wish to save.
The company’s promotions platform offers consumers the ability to save through cash-back rebates, digital paperless promotions and digital print promotions, available across the company’s distribution network. With digital paperless and rebates, shoppers add promotions directly to retailer loyalty accounts for automatic digital redemption, or use a mobile device to take a picture of a retailer receipt with the appropriate purchase for cash-back redemption. With digital print, shoppers select promotions and print them from their desktop or mobile device to redeem in-store.
Through this platform, brands and retailers can reach shoppers on the web and on mobile devices by offering digital promotions through the company’s extensive network, which includes brand and retailer websites and mobile applications; thousands of third-party publisher websites and mobile applications; and the DTC Shopmium mobile application.
Promotions can be personalized and/or targeted to shoppers through a combination of data points, including historical shopper purchase and intent data, promotion activations and redemptions, shopper interests, online click and search behavior, demographics, and location data. These techniques are designed to enable the company to optimize the delivery of promotions across the network and drive campaign performance.
The company’s promotions platform is used by retailers in the grocery, drug, automotive, mass merchant, dollar, club and convenience merchandise channels to integrate into their POS systems or loyalty programs. This solution is designed to function as a component of the retailer's digital marketing platform, to create a direct, digital relationship with shoppers, and to engage them through an omnichannel experience. Through the company’s promotions platform, the company uses consumer data and insights to distribute personalized and targeted promotions and media, primarily funded by the company’s advertiser customers, to help drive consumer loyalty and increase sales. Additional solutions on this platform that aim to increase visibility of promotions include personalized e-mails, digital grocery lists, branded event pages, and digital circulars.
Direct-to-Consumer (DTC)
The company’s direct-to-consumer properties play an important role in its network as an additional way for the company to drive action from consumers. The company provides CPGs and other parties access to its properties, namely the Shopmium app, to deliver cash back rebates to consumers and market advertisers' brands media and product placements.
In 2022, the company launched Shopmium, the company’s formerly solely EU-focused app, in the U.S. market. Shopmium is the company’s premium DTC brand that provides a rich set of features and capabilities to the company’s partner network and drives consumer engagement and savings. Shopmium is replacing Coupons.com as the company’s DTC product in the U.S.
During 2022, the company entered an agreement with CupoNation GmbH to sell the domain Coupons.com. Prior to 2022, Coupons.com was the company’s flagship consumer brand with both mobile app and website properties that delivered savings to consumers. The transfer of the Coupons.com domain to CupoNation GmbH is planned to conclude in 2023.
Retail Ad Network
The company’s Retail Ad Network aims to address the previously discussed challenges facing brands and retailers due to the increasing fragmentation of the retail media ecosystem. The Retail Ad Network solution is designed to aggregate individual in-housed retail media networks to enable the planning, buying, execution and measurement of scaled yet targeted media campaigns, through one centralized platform. The platform-based solution aims to provide brands with a way to support multiple national and regional retailers with advertising without having to resource and navigate the individual networks of each retailer.
The Retail Ad Network is in its early stages, with several brands and retailers participating in the company’s initial launch in late 2022. In 2023, the company plans to continue to develop and scale the Retail Ad Network through adding new retailers and new channels.
Digital-out-of-Home (DOOH)
The company’s digital-out-of-home (DOOH) offering features proprietary location-based technology that allows marketing agencies and advertisers to target specific consumer segments, reach shoppers in and out of stores through digital screens located outside of the home—in places, such as retail establishments and transportation hubs—and measure the direct impact on sales. Quotient's self-service platform is designed to address the unique challenges of the DOOH market.
The company provides proprietary data and analytics capabilities as part of its offerings across all product families through the company’s measurement platform, Quotient Analytics. This provides campaign analytics and measured sales results to brands and retailers, attributing digital promotions and/or media campaigns to in-store and online purchases. Through Quotient Analytics, the company combines purchase data from select retailers across the company’s network with online engagement and purchase-intent data from Quotient’s consumer properties and its publishing partners. The company’s campaign measurement tools are also designed to provide brands and retailers with flexibility to optimize their campaigns to drive greater efficiency with marketing dollars. This capability and analysis is provided to customers who utilize the company’s promotions and/or media platforms. The company’s campaign measurement tools provide the basis for the company’s calculations to CPGs regarding their Return-on-Ad-Spend and Return-on-Promotion-Spend. As the company’s platforms, network impact and audience numbers expand, the value of the company’s data and analytics increases.
Growth Strategy
Broadly speaking, there are two thematic pillars of the company’s growth strategy: expanding the company’s promotions network, and investing in strategic growth initiatives built around key areas of the company’s existing platform.
Fraud Prevention and Distribution Controls
The company’s platforms include a proprietary digital distribution management system designed to enable CPGs and retailers to securely control the number of coupons distributed by device. The company has controls in place to limit the number of digital coupons that can be printed. Similar controls are in place for linking coupons to loyalty cards and other paperless solutions, which allows the company to limit the number of coupons distributed and activated. In addition, each printed coupon carries a unique identifier (ID) that is encrypted, enabling the company to trace each coupon from print to redemption. All of the company’s digital print coupons can be authenticated and validated using this unique code. This unique identifier (‘ID’) also can be used to detect counterfeit or altered coupons. The company’s platforms allow the company to systematically identify and respond to fraudulent and prohibited activities by restricting a device from printing coupons. The company also has a proprietary rebate distribution solution with built-in authentication capabilities through phone and payment verification. Additionally, the company has transactional level controls for rebates to enforce stacking rules and prevent receipt alteration and/or manipulation.
Sales and Marketing
The company has a team of dedicated, skilled specialists focused on CPGs and retailers. The company’s sales activity is focused on expanding the number of brands and marketing agencies the company works with within existing and new CPG customers, including a focus on smaller CPGs and new categories. The team is also focused on expanding relationships within CPGs to new buyers, such as shopper marketing and digital media teams, where there is a large opportunity for growth. Additionally, the company is focused on continuing to increase the size and breadth of the company’s partner networks through growing existing partnerships and adding new partnerships with retailers and publishers.
In addition to sales support during the campaign planning process, the company’s sales representatives provide additional support to CPGs and retailers with the intention of ensuring that their campaigns are launched and delivered within specified time frames. Representatives assigned to specific customers review performance metrics and share feedback with the advertiser.
Intellectual Property
Quotient, Ubimo, Ahalogy, Elevaate, SavingStar, Shopmium and the company’s other registered or common law trademarks, service marks or trade names are the property of Quotient and its subsidiaries.
As of December 31, 2022, the company held or had exclusive rights to 52 active issued patents in the United States and 36 active patents that have been issued outside of the United States with terms expiring between 2024 and 2040.
Competition
The company competes against a variety of companies with respect to different aspects of its business, including:
Direct-to-consumer apps, such as iBotta, Inc. and Fetch Rewards, which offer cash back rebate and rewards solutions;
Other providers of digital promotions, such as Valassis Communications, Inc.; Catalina Marketing Corporation’s Cellfire; Inmar/You Technology; and Neptune Retail Solutions;
Offline coupon and discount services, as well as newspapers, magazines and other traditional media companies that provide coupon promotions and discounts on products and services in FSIs or other forms, including Valassis Communications, Inc., Neptune Retail Solutions and Catalina Marketing Corporation;
Retailers who develop and manage, with or without a third-party vendor, retail media or data products in-house, such as the Albertsons Media Collective, or The Kroger Company (Kroger) with its wholly owned subsidiary of 84.51°;
Companies offering digital advertising technology, inventory, data, and services solutions and channels for advertisers and retailers, including Meta Platforms, Inc. (doing business as Facebook), Alphabet, Inc. (Alphabet), Pinterest, Inc., Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), Adobe Inc., The Trade Desk Inc., Oracle Corporation, Criteo S.A., Microsoft Corporation, Publicis Groupe's CitrusAd, and others.
History
The company was founded in 1998. It was incorporated in 1998. The company was formerly known as Coupons.com Incorporated and changed its name to Quotient Technology Inc. in 2015.
