05.14.2008 — OwnerIQ is providing marketing managers with a new way of targeting their respective messages: ownership targeting.

Ownership targeting focuses marketing campaigns at those consumers who have already purchased certain items that will lend to a subsequent purchase a related product.

Normally, marketers compare demographic data with sales trends and make educated guesses about what advertising audience will be most receptive. This is called targeting demographics.

OwnerIQ CEO Jay Habegger says targeting demographics doesn't work as well as what he offers. "General demographics are used to infer what our ownership marketing data can actually tell you."

The problem with ownership targeting, until now, has been being able to determine who owns what. OwnerIQ has created a clever way to gather data.

Habegger explains that the user manual is the consumer's "first point of departure for finding out about the usability" of products. Because of that, OwnerIQ has leveraged the manual as a way of acquiring ownership data.

"We set out to aggregate all of these manuals in one easy-to-find place," Habegger explains.

Indeed, OwnerIQ.net features tens of thousands of user manuals that are available to visitors free of charge. "We have the most robust collection of manual content anywhere," Habegger says.

As consumers register with the site to retrieve the sought-after manual content, they provide OwnerIQ with household ownership information.

This information is sold to marketing agents. OwnerIQ site visitors can be "targeted downstream" as they surf the Internet based on their ownership and apparent shopping interests, Habegger says.

Prior to launching OwnerIQ in 2006, Habegger sold his previous brainchild, Bitpipe.com (an online library of IT whitepapers), for $40 million.

"After that, I was looking for what to do next," he says. "Now, we've figured out our economic incentive: the ownership targeting model."