Sense Networks: No PBRs For You!
Last week there was a really good article in Business Week on Sense Networks, which I think is one of the more interesting companies out there in LBS.
I had posted about Sense Networks previously, but the Business Week article gives a nice long overview of some of the recent developments.
The article focuses a lot on the tribes and the study of the behaviors of those within the tribe for the purposes of mobile advertising delivery, which is very interesting indeed, but we may have quite a wait before that information could be put to use in a live, on demand ad call, particularly since there seems to be a lot of pushback to using such information on an individual user level, as opposed to in aggregated form.
The whole article made me think about drilling down on the places rather than the people and how old school some of the current marketing tools really are and how a refresh may be in order. Take for instance target marketing by zip code. First of all, if the U.S. covers over 9 million square kilometers, and includes 43k zip codes, that means on average a zip code covers 213 square kilometers. Sure there are some sweeping generalizations you can posibly make about everyone in that 213 square kilometer area, but they would be just that… sweeping generalizations.
I just had a look at a map of my hometown zip code in Gainesville, Florida which is home to the University of Florida and which in many ways is a pretty dichotomous place, where conservative deep south meets liberal college town, and just eyeballing the map I can think of at least four different ‘areas’ of residences which probably have little more than a love of Gator football and a Publix in common.
The zip code covers a good chunk of the city which includes areas of student oriented housing full of 18-21 year old undergrads, at least two good sized trailer parks, a very large upscale development full of mostly white collar families, and at least a few farms. Now I don’t know how many people fit into each of those four ‘types’, but I am sure there are marketers in New York buying that zip code thinking they’re getting college students, and well I guess they’d be probably about half right, but it’s certainly not the complete story.
Zip codes were designed to help the government get the mail out to you, and in todays information age they seem about as useful for marketing as the dewey decimal system is for organizing and helping you find the worlds information.
Maybe we’ll see a Sense Networks “Network of Reservations” to go with their “Tribes” which can reveal some details on the territory within those zip codes and clump similar reservations together for use by marketers on and offline alike.
No matter how many ads for the Albertson’s $9.99 case of PBR special my parents see, I don’t suspect that, even in this economy, they will become buyers anytime soon.
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