Infutor launches a propensity marketplace of consumers interested in buying cars

Founded in 2003, Infutor has built a massive repository of several hundred million identified profiles for US consumers.

These consumer identities contain names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of those individuals, along with attributes added from mostly public sources — such as car and home ownership or if a person has recently moved. The company then makes these profiles available for targeted advertising, email or other marketing efforts by credit bureaus, Fortune 500 retailers, marketing agencies and risk/fraud assessors.

This week, the Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois-based company is launching an Auto In-Market marketplace drawn from those profiles, to predictively score the likelihood that the 190 million car owners in its database would be receptive to buying a new car.

Infutor said this auto marketplace is the first of several industry- or product-focused propensity-scoring marketplaces that it intends to launch. The next one might focus on real estate, VP of Product Management MJ Yafchak told me, since the consumer records track individuals’ history of property transactions.

The scoring — from one to 100 — indicates the individual’s likelihood to be receptive to an offer in one of five car-related categories: buying a new car, buying a used car, auto insurance, car parts/service or arranging for car financing. The score doesn’t indicate if the consumer is likely to buy a specific brand or type of car, although Yafchak told me that her company was exploring that possibility.

Machine learning

To determine the characteristics of people in the market for a new car, the company’s system uses machine learning to analyze about a hundred data points from historical data on car ownership and purchase behavior. Some people get a new car every three years, for instance, while other typical buyers might be young parents who have just moved.

Once typical characteristics are established, the model is then applied to the 190 million consumer records of car owners in Infutor’s database to determine which ones are most likely to be in-market for one of the five car-related categories. The top scorers in each category, about 60 million consumers, are then recommended to marketers as likely targets.

Yafchak said that Infutor’s propensity score is as much as three times more likely to indicate that someone is open to an offer in one of the car-related categories as, say, a targeted segment of car owners. Being open to an offer means they would click on a car ad, fill out a form for more car information, or fulfill whatever performance metric the marketer has set.

Consumer records of those with a high propensity score for these car categories had been made available over the last year to programmatic ad platforms, she said, which targeted ads at the cookies and mobile device IDs matched to the identified profiles. The new Auto In-Market marketplace is making this scoring of selected consumers available to any marketer, for other channels like email, social marketing or snail mail.

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About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.