Heard on the Street, Episode 28: Location-Based Survival of the Fittest, With Gimbal
According to Gimbal’s SVP of location platforms Adrian Tompsett, the key to the location business is having a long-term and holistic view of customer value. That means using location intelligence to go beyond just triggering promotions to increase the customers’ basket size, instead using the technology in ways that will provide additional value in the long term.
After Foursquare Acquisition, Placed Founder David Shim Talks Teaming Up With a Major Competitor
How did a Seattle-based ad tech company move up the ranks to become an industry darling, less than eight years after its launch? And how does the new relationship between Foursquare and Placed, which was previously the biggest competitor to the company’s Foursquare Attribution product, impact the location industry at large?
To find out, we caught up with Placed founder and CEO—and now president of Foursquare—David Shim. Here are his thoughts on what it’s like to go through an acquisition, and how two industry heavyweights who’ve competed for years are finding new ways to work together.
Foursquare Acquires Placed, Announces $150M in Funding
Foursquare and Placed are location tech’s new power couple.
The location intelligence firm is acquiring Placed, which had previously been bought by Snap for its top-rate online-to-offline attribution solution, and the two will offer one of the most powerful attribution solutions in the location industry, to be called Placed powered by Foursquare.
As ad tech faces tougher times and a privacy-driven crackdown on data collection and ad targeting practices, more mergers and acquisitions are likely to transform the industry’s terrain. Teaming up and stockpiling as much first-party data as possible, thereby eliminating the need for less compliant modes of data harvesting, will boost the longevity of some firms while others flounder.
Good Data vs Bad: How to Decide What to Keep and What to Discard
Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” for separating good data from bad. Instead, organizations should think of data quality as a habit, with “good” data clearly defined and concrete processes in place to harvest what’s valuable and discard what isn’t.
With that in mind, here are three steps to taking unfiltered data and deciding what to keep — and what to throw out — to achieve optimal data accuracy.
As GDPR’s One-Year Anniversary Approaches, Where Are We Now?
One year in, it’s clear that the full impact of GDPR still hasn’t been felt. The regulation is structured in a way that puts less pressure on large companies than smaller businesses, and that’s something that regulators will have to continue sorting out. But the changes Europe’s law portends are undeniable: Privacy legislation is coming to the United States, and the data collection practices that made many Silicon Valley pioneers rich will never be quite so unbridled again.
The 10 Commandments of Location Intelligence Marketing
The amount of location data can be overwhelming, making it difficult to understand when to use what information. Even the most experienced marketer can lose sight of the basic principles that guide successful use of location intelligence tools.
Based on our 11 years of experience helping mobile apps leverage the context of their users, we offer the following 10 commandments that every marketer working with location intelligence should keep top of mind to drive a successful marketing strategy.
Heard on the Street, Episode 25: Location, Brand Evolution, and Career Lessons, with Factual
Brands want to engage consumers. Though that’s an obvious statement and a universal truth, how it happens is a moving target that shifts with consumer technology. Success in the ad tech world requires intellectual curiosity about emerging tech and a desire to dig into the details.
Factual VP of Agency & Strategic Partnerships Ocean Fine considers that curiosity essential to her success and the victories of any company in ad tech. The latest guest on Street Fight’s Heard on the Street Podcast, she’s inspired by the smartphone’s transformation and advises marketing execs to be attack-ready for all emerging tech.
Programmatic OOH Is Real. Why Isn’t Your Agency Using It More?
The ad tech industry’s state of flux and disarray spurs confusion and buyer skepticism of real innovation. This is particularly prevalent in rapidly evolving areas like programmatic that also contend with existing legacy trust issues. I come across this every day, as there seems to be a persistent rumor that programmatic Out of Home (OOH) is “fake,” and that, when looking under the hood, programmatic OOH is merely an automated process for reserving and purchasing inventory. This misconception results in missed opportunities for marketers.
Factual Partners with Airship and Braze to Power Location-Based Mobile Marketing
The partnership will enhance Airship and Braze’s efforts to furnish clients with precise mobile messaging based on the location of the customers they want to reach. Airship and Braze help brands engage their customers, retaining their business and ideally driving them back in-store. Airship rebranded, dropping the Urban from its name, last month.
Foursquare’s Location-Based Loyalty Metrics Point to Best Practices for Casual Restaurants
Brushing aside customer surveys and other imprecise measures of customer loyalty, location intelligence firm Foursquare released a location-based report this morning that evaluates best practices and practitioners in loyalty among casual restaurant chains.
Most importantly for future considerations, the report suggests that brands can improve loyalty in all four of the areas that contributed to its index.
The Power of Micro-Location Technology
The location market has matured beyond push. The value of micro-location technology is now built on hyper-accurate analytics on where users go in the physical world, allowing advertisers to re-target them with a variety of omnichannel marketing efforts. Here are a few exciting use cases that highlight the power of hyper-accurate location-based marketing technology.
Location Data Confidence in an Exploding Data Universe
Location intelligence, sourced securely and used in the right way, is an extremely powerful tool to craft precise targeting, predictive modeling, and creative media that drive meaningful marketing moments, massive ROI, and brand growth. Unfortunately, the location intelligence sector has also become a jungle of data fraught with fraudulence and insecurity.
Location intelligence is powerful, but in today’s highly scrutinized world, you have to challenge every resource you engage to ensure confidence in its quality. There are three critical questions you should ask data partners before you engage them.
Freckle IoT Announces Attribution Backed by Fully Compliant First-Party Data
With privacy top of mind for marketers, offline measurement firm Freckle IoT is hitting the market this morning with an expanded attribution product backed by just about the most compliant consumer data on the market. Its compliance is secure because it comes from Killi, a consent management company also founded and headed up by Freckle Founder and CEO Neil Sweeney.
3 Revenue Growth Opportunities for SMB Marketing and Ad Agencies
While SMB digital marketing spend has seen a steady rise, SMBs are being more conservative about the agencies and vendors with which they partner. In the transparency era, consolidating spend with a select group of trusted agency partners that offer multiple core services is now the norm.
For agencies that cater to SMB brands, these trends have created opportunities and challenges. There is money to be had, but only organizations that differentiate themselves from the competition and can deliver clear ROI will benefit. So how can SMB agencies show their value to brands and ensure revenue growth? There are three opportunity areas, in particular, that can help.
The DOOH Opportunity: How OOH is Becoming a Bigger Piece of the Media Mix Pie
Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising is having a fantastic run. It is the only traditional media channel to consistently grow over the last 10 years and is expected to continue growing in 2019, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.
However, OOH teams are often siloed away from broader digital marketing teams and are categorized differently in budget breakdowns and post-campaign analysis. As the field adapts and evolves, continued separation of digital and OOH teams is going to hinder, rather than help, your efforts and results.
Location Data Verification Firm Location Sciences Expands to Americas
As the location data and marketing industries experience heightened calls for privacy and quality control, location data verification solution Location Sciences is expanding to the Americas. The London-based firm also announced on Tuesday morning its appointment of digital marketing veteran Warren Zenna to take the helm on this side of the Atlantic.
Location Analytics Applied to the NFL
Nate Sterken: Location data generated from cell phones powers many of the ad-tech products with which we all work every day, from in-person attribution to targeting segments based on visitation patterns. Earlier this year, I got to work with data generated from a completely different source — professional football players.
Foursquare Launches Hypertrending, A Next-Gen View of the Hot Spots in Town
Foursquare announced on Friday, coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of its launch at SXSW, a new feature called Hypertrending that shows users the most popular places where people are meeting up around them.
Four Targeting Myths That Devalue the Real Power of Location Data
Jake Moskowitz, head of the Emodo Institute, debunks some myths about location data. Here’s the first shocking one: Location data can’t find you 60 million devices that visited a Hyundai dealership within the last month or two… or three, because that’s impossible. Throughout all of 2017, across the entire US, there were only about 17 million cars sold in total. That includes Hyundai, Honda, Ford—indeed, all brands. In data stores, users run across super-sized segments all the time. It’s not uncommon for vendors to claim that their single-brand auto dealership visitor segments include tens of millions of consumers. Location data is powerful, but it can’t make up shoppers.
5 Questions Brands Must Ask Their Agency About Location Data
Advertisers are unknowingly wasting 30 to 50%, and as much as 80%, of their location-based targeting spend on inaccurate, poor-quality data, some of which is fraudulent. They are being told by their partners that “everything is fine,” but the answers to a few questions could reveal a very different story.
Here are five questions brand managers should be asking their agency partners about location data. The answers will help vet the quality of the data you are purchasing.