Rakuten LogoNEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Rakuten, Inc., owners of one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, today launched Rakuten Marketing, its new business division focused on digital marketing. This division is the culmination of Rakuten’s investments in digital marketing product development with recent acquisitions, namely PopShops and MediaForge.

The launch of Rakuten Marketing formalizes the integration of recently acquired businesses, as well as the investments into home-grown talent and technologies to unify services spanning display, mobile, search, affiliate, retargeting, lead generation, and automated product feeds. As part of that alignment, Rakuten Marketing is introducing an omni-channel technology platform and has appointed its first chief marketing officer.

Yaz Iida, chief executive officer of Rakuten Marketing, explains, “As a unified business, Rakuten Marketing’s focus is to simplify the increasingly complex challenges that marketing professionals face by delivering insight and analysis through the new Cadence platform. Rakuten Marketing’s integrated approach, which encompasses analytical insights, tools, and e-commerce expertise will save marketing professionals significant time and allow them to better focus on identifying the best strategy and actions to yield positive results.”

Iida continues, “Rakuten Marketing will use a variety of technologies, as well as the insights of highly experienced service teams to support the evolution of digital marketing as it responds to the ever-changing demands of modern consumers.

Fundamental to the new, integrated business is the introduction of Rakuten Marketing’s new omni-channel optimization platform, Cadence. The Cadence platform provides marketing teams and professionals with a single, consistent, view into real-time performance across all communication channels. This eliminates inconsistencies when measuring or reconciling campaign results, and offers marketers a clear understanding of which channel to use at any given point in the campaign to glean the best results, saving significant time and financial cost.

The Cadence platform allows for deeper attribution analysis into specific behaviors. For example, how many times is a customer exposed to a message before making a purchase, what is the cost of customer acquisition, and what is the impact of combining marketing channels to increase revenue.

“At Lancôme we often need to integrate different technologies into one campaign so the idea of being able to streamline and simplify that process is compelling,” said Alessio Rossi, vice president of Interactive Marketing, Lancôme Paris. “We rely on Rakuten Marketing’s dynamic display and affiliate offerings to increase awareness, engage customers, and ultimately drive sales on top of learning how customers decisions form as they receive different marketing inputs. We are confident this approach will allow us to drive even greater results both online and offline.”

Additionally, Rakuten Marketing has appointed Jessica Joines to the newly created position of chief marketing officer. With more than 15 years experience in marketing with expertise in branding, strategic positioning and media buying, Jessica is responsible for Rakuten Marketing’s global marketing and public relations efforts.

About Rakuten Marketing

Rakuten Marketing provides advertisers and marketers with expert technology and services for affiliate marketing, retargeting, display, mobile, search marketing, lead generation, and automated product feeds. The company is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Australia, Brazil, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States. As part of Rakuten, one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, Rakuten Marketing includes Rakuten LinkShare, the #1 ranked performance marketing network, Rakuten MediaForge, a leader in retargeting and display recognized for its pay-for-performance consumer engagement business model, Rakuten Search, a full service search engine marketing company, and Rakuten PopShops, a data analytics engine and product feed and deals content aggregator.

About Rakuten

Rakuten, Inc. (4755:Tokyo), is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of services for consumers and businesses, including in the areas of e-commerce, eReading, travel, banking, securities , credit cards, e-money, logistics, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. In both 2012 and 2013, Rakuten was ranked among the world’s ‘Top 10 Most Innovative Companies’ in Forbes magazine’s annual list. Rakuten is expanding worldwide and currently operates throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Founded in 1997, Rakuten is headquartered in Tokyo, with over 10,500 employees and partner staff worldwide. For more information: http://global.rakuten.com/corp/

Contcts:
Rakuten Marketing
Lisa Mollura, 646-943-8221
lisa.mollura@mail.rakuten.com
or
Blanc & Otus
Kathy Keating, 617-460-2702
kkeating@blancandotus.com