5 Platforms Connecting Local Customers to their Online Footprints

Major brands and enterprises are demanding more from their marketing and advertising departments this year, as big data continues to play a more integral role in the way these companies connect with customers on a local level.

According to a recent report from the IAB, more than half (57%) of marketers expect cross-channel measurement and attribution to occupy most of their time, attention, and resources in the coming year. Many of these marketers will be exploring new technologies that close the loop on attribution and unlock the hidden connections between web viewing sessions and in-store purchases around the globe. As interest in this area goes up, so do budgets. Seventy-one percent of marketers in IAB’s survey said they anticipate spending more on data and related services in 2017 than in previous years.

Here are five examples of technology platforms serving this emerging market.

1. Semcasting: Actionable intelligence for marketers
Semcasting offers data and audience targeting solutions designed around marketing. For retailers with physical locations, the company has designed an audience targeting platform called Smart Zones that converts offline customer lists into an online audience and supports targeting at specific locations, like home or work. Semcasting has also developed an attribution solution called Mobile Footprints, which enables marketers to connect digital ads to a shopper’s mobile device in order to verify whether a person who viewed an online ad visited a specific brick-and-mortar store. Semcasting works with firms in the retail, automotive, financial services, travel, and entertainment industries.

2. NinthDecimal: Visibility into real-time campaign performance
As a mobile programmatic and audience intelligence platform that enhances the way marketers understand people, NinthDecimal aims to help marketers understand their consumers’ path-to-purchase. NinthDecimal leverages data from more than a billion mobile devices to target and retarget shoppers based on their current locations, offline purchasing data, and mobile devices. NinthDecimal uses behavioral, location, and spending data components to tell brands where shoppers go after viewing their mobile ads, and which consumers are being driven into physical stores by which specific ads or campaigns. NinthDecimal works with major brands like Target, McDonalds, and Sonic.

3. Placed: Quantifying how advertising impacts in-store visits
Placed measures billions of locations through an opt-in mobile location panel, and then uses the resulting data to provide major brand marketers with location-driven insights. By connecting local consumers with their digital footprints, Placed is able to track how store visitation trends change over time and pinpoint any real world trends that might be influencing consumer behaviors. Brands can also quantify the offline behaviors of the specific consumer segments they’re interested in targeting, like millennial women or married men. Placed has worked with brands like BMW and STX Entertainment.

4. Adbrain: Data to deliver consistent messaging across platforms
Adbrain offers customer ID mapping technology that helps marketers reach customers across multiple digital touchpoints. Marketers can deliver consistent messages across all the devices, platforms, and channels they utilize, with the ultimate goal of better understanding their specific audiences and increasing the total reach of their campaigns. From a high-level view, that means that rather than sending one message to three different customers, a brand is able to know that it’s actually reaching the same customer on three different devices. With this knowledge in hand, the brand can then customize its marketing messaging. Adbrain works with retailers, automotive, CPG brands, and agencies.

5. Drawbridge: Cross-device identity matching
Drawbridge uses machine learning to match individual consumers to their connected devices, for the ultimate purpose of retargeting, attribution, and content optimization. Brands and enterprises can use the platform to create 360-degree views of their ideal consumers. Drawbridge uses predictive technology, and it gathers its data from a combination of location data providers, mobile data providers, mobile exchanges, and desktop exchanges. The platform tracks locations, demographics, mobile app preferences, and even offline preferences (like which groups of consumers visit gyms most frequently). The data that Drawbridge collects can then be ported to existing CRM, DMP, DSP, or email marketing clouds for more detailed attribution.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.