Jones Media emerges on Canadian media landscape with new strategies to target premium consumers

--Industry veterans offer platform for second-party Canadian shopper audience--

TORONTO, June 25, 2013 /CNW/ - Media mavens and founding partners, Cathy Fernandes and Erin McDougald are pleased to announce the opening of their new Toronto-based media company, Jones Media www.mrandmrsjones.ca.  They have emerged onto the Canadian media landscape with an impressive roster of top-tier online retailers with their first partner, Beyond the Rack www.beyondtherack.com, a Canadian e-tailer success story.

Building better relationships
Jones Media builds trusted relationships with retailers and creates opportunities for national advertisers who want to align messages to a highly targeted and influential online shopper.  The company's founders have forged a formidable team of leading technology partners to create a winning formula that ensures optimal performance.  These partnerships also provide Jones Media the ability to build white label technology solutions.  Ultimately, Jones Media has expanded the Canadian media ecosystem by creating a secure and controlled Data Co-op that can provide second-party Canadian data suppliers with a method of monetizing this asset without jeopardizing confidentiality and or privacy.

"Advertising is all about building relationships and leveraging opportunities in order to drive sales," said Cathy Fernandes, founding partner, Jones Media.  "We specialize in delivering premium shoppers to advertisers who want to engage in a more efficient and effective dialogue with their customers.  At Jones, we provide traditional media platforms and advertising opportunities, which fills a huge gap in the Canadian marketplace regarding home-grown data.  With our Canadian retail partners, we aim to be leaders in the shopper data arena with superior analytic profiling and segmentation, while defining a true 360 degree consumer-centric media proposition."

"The shopper audience is our sweetspot and we are building new media platforms with our retail partners, which are providing new and untouched audiences for our clients," added Erin McDougald, partner, Jones Media.

Big name partners in big data
Jones Media has assembled a team of groundbreaking technology partners.  Datacratic (www.datacratic.com) has created a machine learning platform to enable algorithmic optimization of real time data streams.  The company's software is used by leading DSPs, DMPs and e-commerce web sites.  Jones Media works closely with the data science team at Datacratic to develop the unique predictive algorithms used to drive integrated marketing strategies and achieve clear and measurable goals.  AdGear (www.adgear.com) is a digital advertising technology company, providing software and services for the digital media industry.  The company's full-stack advertising platform offers customers advanced advertising analytics, attribution measurement, ad serving, real-time bidding and exchange technology.  The AdGear private cloud infrastructure handles over 150 billion bid requests and serves over 10 billion impressions monthly.  AdGear is currently working with Jones Media as their DSP provider. 

Creating a captive audience
Jones Media has built a shopper audience network that allows advertisers to surround the consumer with appropriate messaging during each retail touch-point whether through traditional online advertisements, digital audience extension, custom published magazines, sampling or others.  This strengthens the relationship between the advertiser and the customer and creates greater brand awareness, recall and convergent probabilities.

In addition to the more traditional media platforms, Jones Media will generate a Canadian shopper audience Data Management Platform (DMP), allowing advertisers and agencies to layer second-party shopper data to their real-time bidding media buys.  The 'Mr & Mrs Jones' DMP will showcase both branded and non-branded segmentations.

Real-Time Bidding serving up customers as they shop
Real-time bidding (RTB) is a relatively new method of selling and buying online display advertising.  Instead of reserving prepaid advertising space, advertisers bid on each ad impression as it is served.  Ultimately, this process commoditizes impressions inventory.  As a result one must utilize their first-party data and/or access second-party data in order to maximize campaign performance and create a unique buying strategy.

Click, shop and buy... with Beyond the Rack
Beyond The Rack (BTR) is Jones Media's first partner and a significant win for the new company.  BTR offers a private shopping club for women and men who want designer brand apparel and accessories at prices up to 80 per cent off retail cost.  The company obtains authentic designer merchandise and provides it exclusively to their members through limited-time events.  Each event starts at a specific time and typically lasts only 72 hours, after which the merchandise is no longer available.  This exclusive membership has 3.5 M Canadian shoppers and is gaining more than 100,000 new members monthly.  The audience represents a very lucrative opportunity, as the average dwell time is more than 10 minutes per session with more than 100 million page views.  The memberships skews 85 per cent women with moms and new earners alike.  These shoppers are extremely engaged, as the twice customized daily newsletter receives more than 60 per cent open rate.

About Jones Media
Jones Media is a Canadian premium shopper network offering a consumer-centric media proposition to national advertisers, while providing a media revenue stream for retailers and retail enablers, as they capitalize on their very influential audience.  Jones Media creates media messaging around the intent to buy shopper without interfering with the e-commerce mandate.  With full transparency, Jones Media monetizes these audiences through standard online advertising methods, a shopper audience extension product, sampling at the distribution level and leverages first-party online shopper data by creating granular profiling and segmentation through a superior matrix system within a secured, fully filtered DMP.  This allows national advertisers to track and target shoppers at the height of purchasing decisions.  For more information, visit www.mrandmrsjones.ca or on Facebook www.facebook.com/mrandmrsjones.ca and email [email protected].

SOURCE: Jones Media