LocalResponse Appoints Entrepreneur Niels Meersschaert as Senior VP of Technology

Advertising and Software Veteran to Lead Technology Team for Consumer Intent Retargeting Platform

November 07, 2012

LocalResponse, the first advertising platform that helps marketers respond to real-time consumer intent, today announced that Niels Meersschaert has been hired as senior vice president of technology. Meersschaert has extensive experience in advertising and software development and has managed a wide range of product solutions from startup companies such as Magnetic and PixelJump, to global brands such as BusinessWeek and Gucci. In his new role at LocaResponse, Meersschaert will focus on building and testing new products, as well as delivering enhancements to the company’s current suite of social retargeting tools already in use by some of the world’s largest companies.

“As the market and our business continues to scale, we’re excited to inject significant, relevant experience to the leadership of our technology team,” said Nihal Mehta, CEO of LocalResponse.

Meersschaert joins LocalResponse from Magnetic, a leading provider of search retargeting for digital media, where he was a founding employee and principle architect. There, he was responsible for the company’s overall platform, including real-time search retargeting and UI for campaign management. Prior to that, Meersschaert worked as the senior technologist of worldwide e-commerce for Gucci, where he was responsible for the architecture and user experience of the in-house content management system that powers Gucci’s global e-commerce and marketing sites.

Prior to Gucci, Meersschaert built the search engine and syndication tools for BusinessWeek Online, and was the founder and lead developer at PixelJump, an early pioneer in mobile advertising, where he led development for several initiatives, including location-based advertising, mobile games and e-commerce stores.

“LocalResponse is already responsible for some of the more exciting developments in the web and mobile advertising space, and I’m excited about the opportunity to work with an insanely talented team of entrepreneurs and seasoned marketing executives to make a lasting imprint on the future contextual based ads,” said Niels Meersschaert.

With Meersschaert’s hire, LocalResponse continues its commitment to innovation in the targeted advertising space. This year, it has introduced solutions like Intent Targeting and Historical Intent Targeting (HIT), which allows brands to serve hyper-targeted banner ads to consumers based on present and past public social media behavior, as well as the launch of a new mobile in-store circular through its partnership with ShopLocal, a Gannett company. Every month, the company serves more than 7 billion brand impressions over its advertising platform, and monitors over half a billion pieces of consumer intent daily across public social networks.

LOCALRESPONSE HAS HIRED NIELS MEERSSCHAERT AS TECH CHIEF

Nov. 6, 2012

Meersschaert was formerly a developer and technologist at Gucci, Business Week and Magnetic. He takes the title of svp/technology at the mobile social media retargeting company.

Turn the Clock on Ad Targeting

By ZOG Digital, Published October 25, 2012

Advertisers everywhere, rejoice! A more precise way for you to target consumers through social media has been released. LocalResponse has teamed up with Datasift – a social data platform – for historical intent targeting (HIT).

Historical intent targeting allows marketers to access social information from public networks, such as Twitter, Instagram and FourSquare. It can pull only from information that has been made publicly available. For example, a pin shared on Twitter is fair game.

LocalResponse says that although this targeting method is available for all advertisers, they are focusing more on the retail and entertainment industries for now. HIT offers the opportunity for marketers to send more relevant messages to consumers.

Those looking to advertise the up-coming DVD release of a movie, for instance, can go back and find all of the people who tweeted about seeing it in theaters. Entering into the holiday season, retailers can look at previous tweets to discover the most talked about shopping locations on Black Friday.

Another way in which HIT is helpful is in identifying the progression of the purchase path. If a user tweeted in 2010 about being pregnant, then brands such as Baby Gap have insight into who their current customers may be, increasing the accurateness of messages.

Similar to the social ad targeting capabilities on Facebook, this certainly has the potential to increase advertising effectiveness. By taking personal thoughts and interests into account, brands can further increase their knowledge on audience demographics.

Reaching back into the past can leave more room for error as preferences change, but it also can appeal to user nostalgia or predict current information based off of previous check-ins or tweets. It will all come down to how brands decide to utilize this new pool of information.

LocalResponse Can Now Target Ads Through Historical Social Data

By Mike Stenger

LocalResponse offers valuable advertising solutions to small and big business and now the company has introduced new ad targeting options for historical data and check ins. Businesses have been able to target users based on their tweets, but not tweets that go further back in time.

For example, say Bob talked about seeing a new movie several months ago. Now, that movie is available to order on Blu-ray and DVD so LocalResponse can target Bob with an ad for the movie. This new service is great for advertisers and since ads aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, better targeting is always a great way to remove the nuisance of adverts for consumers.

Businesses will be able to examine historical data not just from Twitter, but also Instagram and Foursquare. Foursquare offers a very interesting benefit to companies as people are not only checking into their locations, but also potentially saying why they are there.

Walgreens for example has used LocalResponse’s Direct Response product to tweet customers as they check in to a location. With historical data, this opens up far more opportunities to better understand customers and provide a more in-depth and meaningful  experience.

Considering that Instagram has quickly grown to surpass Twitter in terms of mobile daily active users (DAUs), this shift represents a new potential goldmine for advertisers.

LocalResponse bets on HIT

by Kristina Knight October 12, 2012

A new retargeting tool out from LocalResponse looks at consumers’ social history as a way to target ads and products. Called HIT - Historical Intent Targeting - the platform from LocalResponse is built upon a social premise: if a shopper mentioned a brand/product on social media they may still be interested in that product.

LocalResponse brings historical intent targeting to Twitter

12 October 2012 16:00pm by Patricio Robles

With consumers posting countless pieces of content each and every day on popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that much of the attention of the social media ecosystem has been focused on ‘real-time.’

But for brands trying to reach consumers on these platforms, is there room for a back-to-the-future approach?

One social advertising firm, LocalResponse, believes there is. Thanks to a partnership with Twitter firehose licensee Datasift, LocalResponse is now pitching advertisers on the ability to target consumers on the popular microblogging service based on tweets posted as far back as 2009.

Adweek’s Tim Peterson explains how this could enable advertisers to target consumers in new ways:

LocalResponse’s historical intent targeting could help advertisers keep their targeting segments fresh. For example, the company could see that someone had tweeted years ago about being pregnant and derive that that person’s child is now a toddler and promote Gap Kids instead of babyGap to them. Or vice versa, Gap could set date ranges for the targetable data so that it only runs babyGap ads to anyone who tweeted about being pregnant nine months to a year ago.

Already, Sony Pictures has trialed historical intent targeting, and while LocalResponse is mum on the specifics, the company’s CEO Nihal Mehta explained that such targeting could, for instance, allow a studio like Sony Pictures to, upon the release of a DVD, follow up with a consumer who had previously tweeted about a movie while it was in theaters.

Are social ad offerings getting too complex?

So is LocalResponse’s historical intent targeting a sign that the tweets contained in Twitter’s vast archive are on the verge of becoming a gold mine that advertisers can actually tap?

Maybe, but not so fast. Looking at a tweet histories may, in theory, be a sensible approach for advertisers. But the operative phrase is “in theory”, and as advertisers consider the benefit to be gained from looking at tweets posted a year or two ago, it’s worth considering whether social ad offerings are getting too complex for advertisers’ own good.

For many advertisers, social’s greatest shortcomings are metrics-related. Advertisers want more insight, something that clearly isn’t lost on one of Twitter’s co-founders. Put simply, without the right metrics, many advertisers are finding it extremely difficult to determine whether a campaign produced a positive ROI. From this perspective, offerings like historical intent targeting, while interesting, don’t seem to solve advertisers’ most pressing challenges.

So what should advertisers do? Certainly, exploration of new social targeting capabilities shouldn’t stop, but before advertisers get overly sophisticated in this area, it’s important that they don’t lose sight of the importance of figuring out how to measure the efficacy of their existing campaigns.

LocalResponse looks at people’s past social media interaction for targeted ads

By Andrea Huspeni

October 10, 2012 

Advertising startup LocalResponse found another way for businesses to reach customers—snooping through people’s social media. The company can now find out about customers through past posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare and target ads accordingly. Previously, businesses used LocalResponse to place ads when a live social interaction occurred on social media, like checking in, and than provide an offer. 

LocalResponse Can Now Target Ads Based On Historical Tweets And Check Ins

October 10th, 2012 Anthony Ha

LocalResponse just announced a new way for its customers to target their ads.

Previously, the startup’s advertisers could reach audiences based on social network activity — for example, after someone checked in to a specific store, they could be targeted with ads that were relevant while in the store. Now those advertisers can also look at historical data, including posts from Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare.

The company says its historical intent targeting (HIT) combines its own technology with social media monitoring tools from DataSift.

CEO and co-founder Nihal Mehta tells me this feature will be available to all of the company’s advertisers, but he’s really focusing on a few industries for now, particularly retail and entertainment, because that’s where this feature is most obviously useful. With HIT, a retailer could lure customers to return by offering special deals to people who checked into their store in the past few months.

Or when a movie studio releases a Blu-Ray/DVD, it could target ads toward people who tweeted about the movie when it was in theaters. LocalResponse says it tested the technology in a pilot program with Sony Pictures over the summer.

The company claims to work with more than 125 advertisers. That’s up from July, when Mehta said the number was 75. (He also said LocalResponse was serving more than 7 billion impressions per month.)

You Probably Forgot That Old Tweet—but Advertisers Haven’t

October 10 2012 Tim Peterson

Social advertisers are like goldfish, not elephants. Because social data is largely real time, it forces marketers to rely on their short-term memory. That’s fine for serving a Taco Bell banner to someone who just tweeted that they’re hungry, but valuable social signals aren’t only those communicated right now.

For example, when Target rolls out its Black Friday ads, the retailer may want to target consumers who tweeted about visiting Walmart on Black Friday last year. Social ad firm LocalResponse is making that possible.

Three months ago LocalResponse began testing the ability toturn back the clock on the social data it used to target ads, and on Wednesday it officially rolled out historical intent targeting. “Before we could only target based on relativelyreal-time data, [going back] a few weeks. Now it’s years,” saidLocalResponse CEO Nihal Mehta.

LocalResponse has partnered with social data platform Datasift—one of three Twitter-certified data providers—to access historical tweets, which LocalResponse then mines for signals of intent to be used to target desktop and mobile display ads.

As with LocalResponse’s intent-targeting tool launched earlier this year, the company only digs through social data that users have made publicly available, which are usually tweets. If someone has shared a Foursquare check-in or Pinterest pin to Twitter, then LocalResponse can use that to target ads, Mehta said.

While Datasift only retrieves tweets from 2009, its competitor Gnip recently made available the full Twitter archive dating back to 2006. Mehta downplayed the three-year gap, saying that the volume of tweets sent from 2006 to 2008 is equivalent to one month’s worth of tweets in 2009.

Sony Pictures piloted the capability with a recent movie campaign. Mehta declined to share campaign results but emphasized how film studios could use historical targeting. For example, a studio could promote a film’s DVD release to users who had tweeted about the movie when it was in theaters.

LocalResponse’s historical intent targeting could help advertisers keep their targeting segments fresh. For example, the company could see that someone had tweeted years ago about being pregnant and derive that that person’s child is now a toddler and promote Gap Kids instead of babyGap to them. Or vice versa, Gap could set date ranges for the targetable data so that it only runs babyGap ads to anyone who tweeted about being pregnant nine months to a year ago.

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