Freckle, AdSquare Team Up on Privacy-Compliant Geo-Contextual Advertising
For years, geo-contextual advertising focused on targeting consumers for specific products or services at specific locations. The strategy has delivered impressive results for many brands and agencies. But with privacy restrictions on the rise, the time has come to start reimagining geo-contextual advertising in a way that brings brands together with on-the-go consumers in a privacy-safe way.
While many vendors are looking at how to expand into privacy-safe geo-targeting, Freckle and AdSquare are getting out ahead of the pack. Just this morning, Freckle and AdSquare announced a collaborative effort to improve geo-targeting capabilities for brands and agencies across North America. Through the collaboration, Freckle will layer its privacy-safe visitation data into AdSquare’s platform.
The collaboration allows Freckle greater access to the many ad firms that have relied on Adsquare’s data inventory and targeting capabilities since 2012, said Christoph Herwig, vice president of marketing at Adsquare. It also allows Adsquare access to additional privacy-compliant data.
The move is designed to enhance how big-name brands reach mobile users on the go. It’s also bringing together two well-known firms in the hyperlocal data space.
As a global company focusing on measurement and identity, Freckle is best known for its privacy-compliant data and agnostic media measurement. The company made headlines last April when it announced an expanded attribution product backed by Killi, a consent management company also founded and headed up by Freckle Founder and CEO Neil Sweeney.
AdSquare has an impressive history as well. The mobile-first data exchange generated significant attention when it launched a product that aggregates first-party data from publishers and combines it with validated third-party data from the company’s own exchange.
Now, Freckle is joining AdSquare’s longstanding efforts to help advertisers reach consumers—and monetize them—when their products or services are top of mind.
“This is an improvement for the industry that has traditionally relied on visit data from very few sources. These sources don’t have perfect coverage and have gaps,” Sweeney says. “For those who have worked with us on measurement in the past, they have felt that our accuracy around visitation is better than those who collect location data from bidstream and other sources.”
Although the collaboration between Freckle and AdSquare was just announced this morning, this isn’t the first time the two companies have worked together. Freckle is one of a number of data providers that has worked with Adsquare to help the company’s clients target customers on the go.
“This is frictionless,” Sweeney says. “AdSquare has a number of integrations into DSPs that buyers and agencies use — this creates more distribution for Freckle as well as more choice for AdSquare clients.”
Freckle has never provided its visitation data to a third party before, but having access to such a strong data set provided the company with a rare opportunity. And while there are inevitably some challenges that come about when you’re trying to move millions of visits into a separate platform, Sweeney says working together with AdSquare in this new collaboration has been relatively seamless.
“Every brand uses targeting to speak to their customers,” he says. “Adding in Freckle’s granular data in multiple markets allows brands to get a higher-fidelity visit than in the past.”
Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.
Correction: A previous version of this article contained statements that misrepresented the relationship between Freckle and Adsquare. The article has been amended to reflect clearly that Adsquare has offered privacy-compliant ad targeting tools for years.
