PlaceIQ Rolls Out LandMark Location Insights Product to Track Consumer Changes

An idea has been percolating for some time at PlaceIQ for figuring out where customers go when they stop visiting a store. Today, the company is revealing its LandMark data product, which is intended to help marketers understand changes in consumer behavior that relate to location — such as shifting their visits from one store to a rival brand.

PlaceIQ is a provider of audience, behavior, and visitation data. CEO Duncan McCall — who will be joining us as a speaker at Street Fight Summit on June 12-14 — says with LandMark his company can now tell clients where they are losing customers and who they are losing them to. The idea is to make sense of location and movement data in ways that advertisers can use, he says.

Beta users of LandMark include Ansible, Havas Media, and Gas Station TV. The platform helps marketers with decision-making on their media activations and see comparisons of foot traffic between their locations and their rivals.

LandMark can discern whether or not a person actually visited a store versus simply being in the area. That is one of the ways McCall says the software is different from proximity marketing. He says LandMark queries datasets PlaceIQ has collected over time and analyzes relationships among those datasets. In the US, he says his company sees where some 165 million anonymous devices go, and connects that location information with related household data, work data, television viewership, and data on retail purchases. Through LandMark, McCall says, brands can ask complex questions to gain clarity on customer behavior and patterns that relate to movement and location.

Getting this technology in the hands of clients, however, has not been a simple process. It had been a challenge for marketers, McCall says, to intelligently make sense of location data as it relates to behavior. The industry, he says, for a long time focused on using proximity marketing instead, which has its limitations. For instance, through proximity marketing everyone within a mile or two of a McDonald’s might get the same McDonald’s ad on their mobile device. “You can’t use that type of data to understand the types of people who visit McDonald’s and how often,” McCall says.

PlaceIQ tried two years ago to show marketers what technology like LandMark could offer in terms of providing more specific insight. Despite the potential, McCall says his company’s attempts at that time to monetize this type of data did not catch on. “It really wasn’t something people were willing to pay for standalone,” he says. “Now, location data has become a mainstream, privacy-friendly concept.”

These days Google, Facebook, and Snapchat, all use location data with minimal friction from the public. Furthermore, McCall says, brands now see that location is an omnichannel force across display, TV, digital, mobile, and print. All consumers are bound to location in one way or another. With that epiphany, brands realized location data could be used to inform retail site selection, competitive intelligence, marketing and analytics, research and planning, and creative. That change in perception regarding location data created an opportunity for LandMark to emerge. “Those things had to be in place before we could see the successful adoption of a product like this,” McCall says.

There is new a level of analytics and understanding based on location, he says, that can show where people shop, demographic information about them, whether or not they travel long distances to reach the location. Analytics around a snowstorm, for instance, can show what types of brands succeed during such weather while others fail.

Sharing of location and movement data is becoming more ubiquitous, but the overall value is still waiting to be proved out. McCall says there is a significant business transformation happening in the world, with notable disruption coming from mobile technology and location. McCall says he sees an opportunity to provide brands with focused data strategies through LandMark. “It’s the fastest growing part of our business now.”

Joao-Pierre Ruth is a Street Fight contributor.

Join PlaceIQ’s Duncan McCall and hundreds of other top local companies and brands at The Best Street Fight Summit Ever — a three-day extravaganza in Brooklyn on June 12-14. Click here to register now!