TruSignal targets potential Fortune 500 consumers online [St. Cloud Times, Minn.]

Feb. 19--Gordy Meyer's two oldest children are college-aged daughters, and he's become acutely aware of how their methods of communication are different from former generations.

"The only way you can reach them is through the computer or on their phone," said Meyer, 51, who lives in Sartell. "They don't subscribe to anything. They don't get any mail. I don't think you'll ever even see them holding a piece of paper."

In contemplating the future they represent, Meyer got an idea. As chief executive officer of eBureau, a St. Cloud-based firm that provides businesses with risk management and fraud protection information, he'd always hoped to channel what his company was doing into other avenues. One of them just opened with the unveiling last month of TruSignal, a sister company to eBureau that connects digital advertisers and interactive agencies with their ideal, high-value audiences.

"Years ago, you used to get catalogs sent to your home," said Meyer, who previously managed a $2 billion direct-mail operation for Fingerhut. "The digital media world is impacting business and, instead of targeting consumers' mailboxes, how can we help companies go online and play in that space?"

Rather than fit eBureau into that plan, the company spun off TruSignal as an online advertising targeting business. The two work together seamlessly, occupying the same space downtown, using many of the same employees and banks of servers that contain trillions of records. However, the delivery model, contracts, pricing and sales process all are different.

Here's how it works:

Imagine a life insurance company, for example, has experimented with online display advertising, perhaps even targeting consumers by age, gender, location or the content of the website they're visiting. While this generated a lot of potential leads, they did not convert well into new customers.

Enter TruSignal, which takes a sample of the insurance company's high-value customer data to create a profile of an ideal target audience. TruSignal combines this with its 40 offline consumer data sources and a patented modeling engine it has developed that identifies 100 predictive factors in a high-value prospect and culls an audience pool of 100 million U.S. adults. The 100 factors are boiled down to a score on a 0-9 range, with 0 being the least likely to become customers and 9 being the most likely.

TruSignal then uses real-time bidding exchange media to buy the right to drop an ad onto a page being visited by one of those 9s.

"It's called programmatic buying," said Meyer, a St. Cloud Apollo High School graduate with an MBA from St. Cloud State University. "The concept is the same as direct mail. But that took six weeks and people might open it and they might not."

Prices a company typically would pay are around $2.50 per 1,000 potential customers, though prices can range from less than $1 to more than $10 depending on supply and demand.

Concentrating efforts

In this TruSignal digital marketing example, converted leads doubled and the average premium sold by that insurance company rose 60 percent. By focusing on high-value prospects, it was able to eliminate 80 percent of its "wasted impressions," and a lot of expense. The approach can be applied to display, video and mobile advertising.

"It's all very technical, from the delivery to getting the data to doing the targeting," Meyer said. "We spent about two years just connecting the dots and solving those problems. Last year we did some pilot testing and we decided it made sense to set it up separately. Since eBureau is established in the risk management world, where companies are coming to us for information, we struggled to explain how we were also going to be in the marketing world, where we would be pushing information out to clients. To be simple and clear, it's better that the digital marketing be through TruSignal."

TruSignal's clients are primarily Fortune 500 companies with national brands. The company currently is at various stages of working with about 50 advertisers, including financial services, insurance, automotive, higher education and travel industries.

One of those is Datamark, a Salt Lake City-based marketer for higher education institutions. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, Datamark works with almost all large and mid-sized brands in the nation. TruSignal has provided Datamark with targets for display and video advertising campaigns.

"We're in the people business, but data is in our name and we're a data-driven company," said Scott Haslam, director of media services for Datamark. "We try to find pockets of individuals who are in a life-stage crisis and they're thinking 'I've got to help myself. I don't have the education I need to have the job I want.' TruSignal helps us pare down a pool of perhaps 200-plus million individuals into a finite number that we can prioritize."

Haslam calls the method a "funneling process" that takes a lot of suspects and identifies the real prospects.

"For an adult to think about going to college or going back to college, that's a deliberate decision that takes weeks and months," Haslam said. "It's not like you roll over one day, look at an ad on the computer and say 'I'm going back to school.' TruSignal identifies someone who is already looking for some of that information. They take into account keywords and what they search for. When we get to market to those people, we become relevant -- which is so important in the digital age. You want to be able to send a laser-focused message. Otherwise you could be wasting your time."

Cutting through noise

Meyer and Jeff Liebl, executive vice president of marketing and chief strategy officer for eBureau, went through dozens of names for their new company before they settled on TruSignal, which coincidentally echoes the sound of a train crossing 100 feet from their building.

"There's a lot of noise in online marketing today," said Liebl, who has been with eBureau since 2006. "We cut through a lot of that. And we also bring you the truth about your audience."

To some, it might seem Orwellian. It's important to note that the 0-9 scores are assigned anonymously, Liebl says. No personal information is shared by TruSignal, which also doesn't work with sites that feature gambling or adult content. The data used is offline information that includes factors such as purchase history.

"The client can customize the results, too," Liebl said. "They can whitelist sites, blacklist others, or maybe they can choose not to do their advertising after midnight. You set up the profiles and the programming and the company decides what it is willing to pay for that audience and it's all automated in real time. The advertising industry on the Internet is almost turning into an industry like the stock market. There are trading desks where people are buying and selling an audience. The more precise the advertising, the more that subsidizes the free content out there (that) a lot of people expect."

Meyer said the launch of TruSignal means he'll likely hire five to 10 people in the next year, joining the 60 already employed by eBureau, which has received an infusion of about $38 million in venture capital in the past eight years. A wholly-owned subsidiary of xTech Holdings Inc., eBureau reported record revenue in 2011. The company's sales grew by more than 10 percent, Meyer said, with a large increase toward the end of the year. He said he's looking for 50 percent revenue growth in 2012 combined between eBureau and TruSignal.

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, U.S. online advertising revenues were growing by 22 percent and surpassed $30 billion last year.

"The market is exploding for online advertising," he said. "Advertisers are trying to keep up with the people who are moving their attention to the Internet. We're helping with that."

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