CoolSavings Qs Up New Corporate Identity

In a bid to attract a wider variety of advertisers, online marketing services firm CoolSavings has changed its name to Q Interactive.

The company says it will keep the CoolSavings brand for its consumer-facing Web site, but the new identity is meant to signal that the company has more to offer advertisers than a single point of presence.

“After being in business for nine years and being best known for coolsavings.com… most people still knew us as a company that provided just that,” Matt Moog, president and CEO of Q Interactive, explained to ClickZ News. “In fact, over the years, we’d gained a lot of experience and success in using data that consumers provided to us to present different types of offers to them.”

Moog said Q Interactive will launch a trade advertising campaign, involving online and direct mail, to promote its new brand name.

The company’s new main focus is the Q Network, which distributes offers to its own Web sites and the sites of publishers like Knight Ridder, Meredith Corp., About.com and Weather.com, reaching 16 million unique monthly consumers. The network, formerly known as the CoolSavings Marketing Network, has helped double the company’s reach from the same period a year ago, Moog said.

“Q Network this year has really exploded in terms of its success,” he said. “Throughout the course of 2005, the company was significantly transformed. That was really the major catalyst, is that the company had just fundamentally changed.”

Moog says the company has more than 1,500 active advertisers, among them Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, JC Penney, Gap, Procter & Gamble, Lending Tree, Netflix and BMG Music Service. But he hopes the corporate name change will help the company move beyond the sectors it has traditionally served.

“A lot of people think of us as retail and consumer packaged goods. We still service those two categories, obviously,” he said, adding that the company also works with for-profit education companies, pharmaceutical firms, travel players and telecommunications businesses. “Where we’re going down the road is to work with more and more industries — from automotive to real estate to insurance.”

Another recent fundamental change for Q Interactive is its ownership structure. In December, privately-held media company Landmark Communications bought the part of CoolSavings it didn’t already own and took it private.