In a recent podcast episode, Add to Cart covered the rise of Particular Audience, including our recent Series A funding round, as well as the importance of using rich-item and item vector data to better understand customer intent. 

The three key takeaways from the podcast include:

• The importance of product intent, over customer segments
• The role of AI at Particular Audience
• The rise of Retail Media

During the podcast, CEO and Founder, James Taylor shares the importance of using item and item relationship data, not personal data, to engage consumers.

“Businesses often try to use customer data to personalize experiences. This is a mistake.

Customers are not commoditized [like items], there are many customers and customers spend a tiny portion of their life on a website. The data is therefore extremely weak.

Good personalization is making good predictions, and making good predictions requires robust data.”

James shares how, through Particular Audience’s Search, Recommendation and Merchandising products we can treat any page view or clickstream as a user’s context. Applying vector technology that matches real time customer intent to show customers the most relevant product to their intent.

Nathan and James then move to the role that AI plays in the Particular Audience platform, where PA use a unique combination of computer vision, natural language processing, and collaborative filtering. 

James emphasises the importance of vectors, stating, “The specific area that we care about is known by a few different names. Vectors, is one name that’s a pretty popular way to describe it at the moment, which is calculating the distance between things, and to calculate distance between things is to calculate the similarity or the complementarity between things and you can have different things that infer that….computer vision for example, is a vector based technology that identifies the similarity between two images.”

This is the technology used to power our core offering of Search, Merchandising and Recommendation tools, ranking products based on relevance and matching real-time intent.

When looking to the future, Nathan predicts that the retail industry will see a big shift in how consumers shop and how advertisers reach consumers online. 

Leading into Particular Audience product, Retail Media, James expresses how Particular Audience can help retailers further monetize their website. Noting that Retail Media netted Amazon over $26 billion in 2021 alone, James emphasises the power of Retail Media to improve customer experience and increase revenue for retailers.

This is done through unlocking vendor marketing revenue for online merchants through creating Amazon-style sponsored products, paid for by brands on cost-per-engagement advertising models. Allowing eCommerce sites of any size to monetize their traffic beyond core revenue streams and assisting all small to medium sized retailers match the customer experience and level of monetization of the bigger players.

To catch the full podcast, visit Add to Cart here or listen on Spotify.