Consumer Analytics

Dallas -- Epsilon, an Alliance Data company, has signed a multi-year agreement with Sephora to provide targeted email marketing services focused on driving sales and creating a more personalized experience for customers across Sephora's omnichannel marketing platforms.  

Under the terms of the deal, Epsilon will provide a full suite of permission-based email marketing services including account and campaign management, strategy and email delivery.

New York - Mobile rich media advertising drives high expansion rates and secondary engagement for retail brands. According to internal retail industry mobile ad performance analyses conducted by predictive mobile advertising provider AdTheorent Inc. across its network during the second quarter of 2014, rich media drove a strong expansion rate across the retail category, delivering at a rate 125% higher than the industry average.

San Jose, Calif. – EBay Inc. is releasing the EBay Enterprise Commerce Marketing Platform, a new omnichannel engagement suite that will enable marketers to drive and optimize one-to-one commerce at scale. Designed and built from the ground up, in strategic partnership with FICO, a predictive analytics and decision management software company, the platform combines the commerce insights, demand generation delivery technologies and intellectual property of EBay Enterprise with FICO’s analytics technologies and products.

Moscow - PlayDisplay, a provider of emotional engagement solutions, is releasing SpaceAR, an augmented realty platform that enables the creation of realistic objects of various sizes and whole virtual worlds. Powered by PlayDisplay’s proprietary technology, the solution makes virtual environment obey the laws of physics and interact with the audience in a realistic way.

New York - While the majority of consumers prefer to both shop and spend their money in brick-and-mortar retail stores, more than 60% are increasing their online shopping activities, according to a survey of 1,515 consumers by digital marketing firm SmartFocus. This trend is most prevalent among women (71%) and Millennials.

Silver Hill, N.J. - Technology company Edgagement, LLC has released a cloud-based mobile training platform that creates product knowledge forums and modules for informing sales associates. Edgagement measures and scores a selling partner's product knowledge, and delivers actionable responses based on those engagements.

New York - SmartFocus has acquired beacon technology specialist TagPoints and social media analytics provider Content Savvy as part of its strategy to develop the U.K.'s first omnichannel digital marketing system. Its platform now offers customer engagement and analytics capabilities across all media channels, so clients can gain deeper insight into consumer behavior.

Pharmavite has named Etienne Patout as its new chief marketing officer and Brett Buatti as VP operations.
 

New York -- Wal-Mart Stores has no plans to join Apple’s newly-announced mobile payments system, Apple Pay, which is due to launch in October.

Wal-Mart is supporting a retailer-owned mobile technology group, the Merchant Customer Exchange, which is launching its own mobile wallet application. The application, called CurrentC, is now in pilot and is expected to be rolled out nationwide in 2015, according to The Washington Post.  Best Buy is also among the retailers supporting CurrentC.
   

San Francisco – EBay Inc. reportedly plans to begin running advertisements within its mobile app during fourth quarter 2014. According to Reuters, the Geico insurance company will be one of the first advertisers.