ClearSight Interactive - ClearTarget
Challenge
ClearSight Interactive is a rapidly expanding start-up that provides a comprehensive range of behavioral targeting solutions for Advertisers and Publishers. The company was founded with a bold intention to revolutionize the online advertising industry by bridging the divide between online and offline universe of consumer data. Having partnered with largest database marketing companies, such as Experian and I-Behavior, ClearSight then needed to develop industry-leading tools that would drastically improve conversions and sales of its potential clients through connecting consumers' online behavior with their offline profile data in a way that has never been done before.
ClearTarget is one of the three products comprising ClearSight Behavioral Targeting Suite. The product was meant to be a middle-tier solution between Publishers' websites and their Ad Serving platform. ClearTarget would enable Publishers to multiply the accuracy of their ad targeting, increasing this way both the value and the attractiveness of their assets for Advertisers. Given SSD prior experience in cost-effective development of industry-leading behavioral targeting solutions for AcquireWeb and DCASTechnologies companies, ClearSight partnered with SSD for the development of ClearTarget product as part of its ClearSight Behavioral Targeting Suite.
Result
Having combined the services of A-level professionals with the best outsourcing practices, prior domain expertise, extensive experience in full software development lifecycle of complex systems, and latest project management methodologies, SSD delivered ClearTarget at the world's lowest Eastern European rates for sophisticated outsourcing. Once ClearSight Behavioral Targeting Suite was unveiled to the public in its Alpha stage at Internet Retailer Conference in Boston, it was named one of the most robust and sophisticated behavioral targeting services offered, and has instantly attracted an impressive roster of inaugural clients and development partners. ClearSight top customers include such companies as Ask.com, Universal Pictures studio, LendingTree, Speedo USA, NewRetirement, American InterContinental University, and Colorado Technical University. The improved advertising effectiveness achieved by Publishers with ClearTarget increases the demand for their assets, resulting in higher inventory sell-through and increased CPM rates. By now, ClearSight has captured billions of consumer behaviors from both online and offline sources, positioning itself for rapid growth, high visibility, and fast success.
Action
SSD fully leveraged its extensive pool of highly-qualified technology professionals, prior domain expertise, as well as operational knowledge of outsourcing industry best practices in order to build enterprise-level product, lower development costs, and achieve short time-to-market for its client.
- Assigned a dedicated project manager who coordinated gathering the requirements, designing the technical architecture, development, and Quality Assurance stages of ClearTarget product along with the other two products comprising ClearSight Behavioral Targeting Suite.
- Involved the assistance of its experienced business analysts at the requirements gathering stage. Assisted ClearSight in preparing detailed product requirements and technical specifications, minimizing this way the number of future changes, and, therefore, slashing the total time-to-market for the product.
- Applied best practices from IMB RUP (Rational Unified Process) project management methodology when creating project roadmap and schedule for ClearSight Behavioral Targeting Suite. Accounted for the possibility of on-the-fly requirements changes, and prepared the list of potential project threats and risks.
- Assigned an engineering team with the right skill-set from its existing pool of IT professionals with 5-10 years of experience in business intelligence, e-commerce, and online advertising space.
- Set up clear communication procedures that included daily voice communication with client-side stakeholders, including product managers, business analysts, and company founders.
- Kept the client constantly informed about the emerging project threats and risks. Provided regular progress tracking, project status updates, and dependency assessments.
- Established a centralized repository for change request management to make sure every client request, as well as every bug found by the Quality Assurance team, were taken care of in order of its priority with regard to the available time and resources.
- Began systematic Quality Assurance tests early in the product development life-cycle to bring down the cost of issue resolution and to ensure the product is released on schedule.
Product Highlights
ClearTarget is a middle-tier solution deployed between Publishers' websites and their Ad Serving platform. Through matching visitors' IP addresses and other information collected by Publishers with comprehensive permission-based profiles of over 100 million consumers, ClearTarget can determine from a host of potential ads which one is best to show to a particular individual dependent upon his/her demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits. ClearTarget's distinguishing features are:
- High-performance – users are identified within few milliseconds
- Proprietary algorithm for evaluating consumer behavioral traits
- Proprietary algorithm for matching behavioral traits to the most relevant advertisement
- Proprietary multivariate modeling capabilities
- Proprietary predictive modeling capabilities
- Easy-to-integrate tagging
- Ability to apply custom rule settings based on behavioral triggers such as
- Website abandoners
- Competitor website visits
- Customer file targeting
- Recent search query behavior
- Proprietary analysis tools that allow Publishers to
- Identify the most effective ads against the target audience segments
- Optimize ad delivery with regard to CTR and assets utilization
- Identify and focus on the most relevant audience