Tapad, Reveal Mobile Partner to ‘Make Attribution Make Sense’

This post is the latest in our “The Next Normal” series. It will be an editorial focus for the month of July, and you can see the rest of the series here. 

As part of the new normal in which we find ourselves, businesses around the country are shifting their advertising and marketing strategies on the fly. Geofencing, geotargeting, and other audience targeting platforms are experiencing exponential growth, and martech companies already working in the space are rushing to adapt their platforms to meet their clients’ changing needs.

Just this morning, Tapad and Reveal Mobile announced that the two companies will be partnering to launch new audience and attribution capabilities for advertising. The collaboration is meant to combine Tapad’s digital cross-device matching technology with Reveal Mobile’s VISIT Local software, which is used for location-based analytics.

Tapad Chief Operating Officer Mark Connon says these new offerings pack a strong focus on geofencing and geotargeting, which are seeing strong adoption during the pandemic.

“The pandemic caused a massive shift in consumer behavior quickly,” Connon says. “Combined with location data, the Tapad graph provides robust insight into these behavioral changes that marketers and ad buyers can use to ensure campaign relevance, even as the situation shifts from moment to moment.”

One hope is that brands will see improved performance when they optimize the ad targeting and messaging for their location-based campaigns. Marketers who are using Reveal’s VISIT Local product will be able to “enhance how they reach shoppers” through cross-device matching and expand location-based services to include devices that share the same household.

This sort of household targeting was possible before the pandemic, but it has become even more necessary for brands since shelter-in-place orders began this spring. With more people living together, and spending more time together inside their homes, having the ability to target multiple members of the same household has become more valuable for marketers. When one member of a household shops for groceries or other essentials, a conversation between multiple members of the household usually takes place beforehand. With cross-device matching, marketers can reach everyone who has influence over what to buy and where to buy it.

“The pandemic has caused people to spend a lot more time at home. That means more time spent with shared devices,” Connon says. ”Brands need to have a better understanding of who is using what device and when, despite these shifting behaviors, in order to make their engagements count.”

Reveal had already been working in the location space with its VISIT Local product, but with its partnership with Tapad, CEO Brian Handly says the company is expanding the reach that VISIT Local provides and “levelling the playing field” for everyone who wants to get consumers into stores and other brick-and-mortar locations.

“Small and medium-sized agencies and brands are often unable to solve their local geotargeting and foot traffic attribution needs because of cost and adtech complexity,” says Handly. “Advertisers can now confidently message everyone in a household who has a say in what that household buys and where they buy it.”

According to Connon, there are currently eight connected networked devices per person in the U.S., and the average consumer moves between devices up to 27 times per hour. These numbers are higher than they were in previous years, and they’re expected to grow even more in the future as the number of touchpoints grows. That makes attribution increasingly complex, and it’s one the reasons why both Connon and Handly believe this partnership between Tapad and Reveal is so necessary.

“Attribution is a cloudy science. It’s hampered by imperfect data, flavor-of-the-day methodologies and made-up terminology that, in the end, does little to prove the value of advertising investments,” Handly says. “As marketing becomes a more exact science, the pressure is on to make attribution make sense.”

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.