Rakuten Recipe and Hakuhodo DY Media Partners Launch TastechEngine®, a Data Management Platform Specializing in Food

Tokyo, March 9, 2018 – Rakuten Recipe, the recipe website operated by Rakuten, Inc., and Hakuhodo DY Media Partners Inc. today announced the launch of TastechEngine®, a new data management platform that predicts consumer food preferences and dietary habits in real time and utilizes the data to provide targeted advertising.

The TastechEngine® platform integrates data from Hakuhodo DY Group’s Sei-katsu-sha Data Management Platform^*1, which incorporates survey-based data on food preferences and dietary habits, purchasing data and demographic projections of individual consumers, with anonymous browsing data from over 10 million monthly Rakuten Recipe users. By enabling greater optimization in the delivery of ads, TastechEngine® will provide more accurate marketing activities for clients seeking food-related business solutions.

Until now, analysis of consumer food preferences has been primarily based on data obtained through surveys. While survey-based data is able to capture changes in dietary attitudes relating to historical trends, seasonal trends and age groups, determining real-time trends taking into account external factors has remained problematic. For example, people who like certain foods may get tired of eating them every day, or their food preferences may change with age. By using even larger-scale and higher-quality food data to optimize targeting appropriately, it will be possible to implement timely measures in response to these everyday changes in dietary habits, thereby enabling effective marketing activities.

Rakuten and Hakuhodo DY Media Partners will use TastechEngine® to provide a variety of useful solutions to clients, such as discovery of new prospective customers based on food preferences and dietary habits or improvement in customer relationship management, to help them maximize the effectiveness of their advertising.

^*1Sei-katsu-sha Data Management Platform: A platform developed for the planning, execution, and management of all marketing activities, combining advanced technologies with proprietary consumer data accumulated by the Hakuhodo DY Group as well as new data made possible thanks to advances in digital technology, including real-time, year-round media consumption and purchasing behavior data and media and content usage and preference data.

Outline
Capable of making predictions about the ever-changing food preferences and dietary habits of consumers in real time, TastechEngine® will make possible effective marketing activities that include timely measures reflecting actual dietary habits.
Service launch: March 9, 2018