PlaceIQ Expands Location Data Network, Joining Oracle’s BlueKai Marketplace
As marketers and agencies become more sophisticated in their use of location data, many are finding that they want to access and blend data streams directly, instead of taking a pre-developed media targeting solution off the shelf.
This morning mobile data company PlaceIQ announced a new integration that will make its audience targeting data available through Oracle Data Cloud’s BlueKai Marketplace. The partnership will give Oracle’s brand and agency customers access to PlaceIQ’s location-based insights about real-world consumer movement, and they can combine it with other first- and third-party data streams to build custom audiences to increase their cross-channel marketing effectiveness.
“We’ve really been throwing around for quite some time this idea that location data will provide an incredibly important horizontal application that can be used across marketing and other use cases,” PlaceIQ’s CEO Duncan McCall told Street Fight. “We started out originally as a data-only company and we realized that there was just no ecosystem for us to put the data into so that people could use it. And we were lucky enough to work with a bunch of customers that said ‘we love what you’re doing, but you’ve got to wrap this in media.’ And so we built a media business, and that continues to grow. But what we heard from our customers was increasingly that people wanted to just access our data.”
McCall said that a number of PlaceIQ clients had gotten to the level of sophistication whereby they were integrated with the DMPs and are able to buy data separately, which they use themselves and combine with other data like in-store purchases, TV viewership, and automobile ownership. So the company went back to its roots as a data company, developing a location data product that could be distributed through marketplaces like Adobe and Oracle.
“The objective is to make the access to this data as ubiquitous as possible for anyone who wants to use it, not only for activation but also for omnichannel purposes,” said the company’s EVP of business development Nadja Kohl. “We reduce the friction and make it as easy as possible to access it so that it can be used horizontally across the marketing organization.”
McCall said that the majority of use cases for marketers accessing the company’s location data are still focused around activation. But he said that, increasingly, there are other applications the brands are finding for the data as well, including analytics and behavioral understanding.
“This is just another brick in the wall of the horizontal expansion of location data,” said McCall. “You start to see now that it’s something that is getting prevalent throughout the industry in lots of different applications. Many of the pieces are stating to come together for this idea that location and location data to become a universal enabler across mediums and across channels.”
David Hirschman is a co-founder of Street Fight.
