PlaceIQ Opens Up Mobile Advertising Data to Agencies
For years, mobile advertising firms have pitched brands on the opportunity to target their customers in the real world. Now, PlaceIQ, a mobile advertising startup, wants to help marketers better understand that behavior before a campaign starts — and understand how it changes after it’s finished.
The New York-based company has released a new consumer insights platform that offers brands and agencies direct access to the underlying data that the company uses to help target ads. The first product on the platform, CIP Analytics, offers partners insight into how their audiences live and buy in the real world with visualizations of movement, purchase and other data collected by the company.
The move marks a return of sorts to the analytics business for the company. The five-year-old company originally launched as a data business, mining and selling information to a marketers, analysts and others. That business struggled to find a market, and PlaceIQ’s team also found that it was incapable of ensuring that the marketers used the information correctly.
PlaceIQ chief executive Duncan McCall says the new product, which the company has tested with more than twenty partners including MediaCom and Starcom MediaVest Group, furthers the company’s mission to help brands understand consumer behavior in the digitally driven world they live in. “It’s a tremendous mechanism to connect data. It shows a really deep and rich new understanding of consumer behavior,” McCall says about the product.
Brands can use the product to see how consumers feel about industry competitors, understand the drivers behind an existing campaign’s success and determine where audiences tend to shop, allowing them to hone in on media targeting and point-of-sale marketing. They can look at the number of people they targeted, understand their shopping habits and that info is now being pushed back to the product teams, design teams and more, allowing that data to be used horizontally, according to McCall.
The company says the new platform also offers the company’s existing attribution capabilities, including Place Visit Rate, TV tune-in, automotive lift and CPG purchase lift. “If you’re a brand or an agency and you run a campaign with PlaceIQ, now you have an interactive, fast-paced dashboard to log into and unlock insights,” McCall says.
PlaceIQ plans to roll out the other two components of its CIP products family this year: CIP Explorer, an audience and data navigator that takes all the interactions between customer’s behaviors across both the physical world and digital data to give brands a window into the lives of their consumers, and the CIP Enterprise Product Suite, which includes a CRM piece for on-boarding customer data and provides brand-specific custom analytics for everything from marketing, to product design, outreach, store planning and more.
Many ad tech companies develop bespoke analytics dashboards in hopes of pitching brands on the capabilities of their media buying products. The question for PlaceIQ and other mobile firms is whether these analytics products are a means to selling more media or a stand-alone data business.
Liz Taurasi is a contributor to Street Fight.
