A Look at Placecast
Do you ever find yourself thinking that you have a pretty good grasp on what a company does, only to one day dig into some real details about their business, and realize that you really had no clue, or that significant money wasn’t made in the way you always thought it was. I am sure everyone has their own example but for me the ones that have jumped out over the years include Blockbuster bringing in up to 19% of its revenue from late fees in some quarters, or how little money movie theatres actually make from selling movie tickets and how little money auto dealers actually make from selling a new car, or gas stations from selling gas.
Well, to be honest I was never sure exactly what 1020 Placecast did although I figured it probably had something to do with targeting mobile ads by geographic location, sort of the mobile equivalent of what I recall Digital Envoy doing for the web world back in the day. While it seems that Digital Envoy has been bought out and diversified their offerings these days, I will always remember them as the guys that many of the major ad servers would use behind the scenes to do the heavy lifting to sniff the IP address of the user and then determine where that user was coming from in order to allow websites to target these users by geography like Los Angeles, or zip code 10021 or Georgia. It came in handy when folks like a regional bank or a theme park that drew most of its clients from a 300 mile radius wanted to advertise online yet only target their geographically relevant prospects.
Well after some more digging on 1020 Placecast and a few conversations with folks more knowledgeable than myself on the subject, I once again discovered that while I may have been a little right, I was mostly wrong and missing most of what they were really about.
First of all, while the company bills itself as a multi platform company including mobile, web and e-mail… web is still the major focus here not mobile, for the simple reason that there is already today a ton of money being invested in web advertising campaigns. So generally what we’re talking about here is good old fashioned banners, buttons and skyscrapers… aka display ads.
Second of all we’re not talking about some behind the scenes nameless and faceless technology that just does its thing anonymously without a thought like Digital Envoy… Placecast is seeking to establish itself as the brand that advertisers and publishers think of when they want to exploit the benefits of localizing their ad messages. You can check out some great examples of their technology at work from the cases on their website.
There are two core components to the 1020 Placecast offering. The first part is a technology which streamlines the otherwise laborious process of customizing each ad creative to its local market. So for example let’s say you’re in Columbus, Ohio looking for cars on autotrader.com. Rather than just seeing a generic Toyota banner ad, maybe you get an ad with some Ohio State logos and Jim Tressel’s mug, along with a Prius in a sweater vest directing you to the closest dealership a few miles away and with a local phone number. Meanwhile, the same ad served to a user surfing autotrader.com in Gainesville, Florida would have a Gator logo and Coach Meyers’ mug directing you to a similarly convenient Toyota dealership in that market.
The benefit of course is that the “localized” ad is more relevant both in to whom it is delivered to AND in what it says. As a result consumers are more likely to respond which is great for the advertiser and means that the publisher may be able to charge more for the inventory too.
The second part of the offering is that Placecast has created a network of 20 publishers where these types of ads are more likely to fit in… ie in localized content where the user location can be easily obtained. So they have partnered with publishers like Trulia and Eventful where the content and intent of the user is locally oriented to begin with… giving advertisers a one stop shop for both the ad serving tools and the network on which to use them. I don’t get the feeling that the getting of the location data involves anything special, it just seems to be provided in any number of standard ways.
While the network has been built from the ground up to be focused on location, in theory there is no reason much of this couldn’t be used for any dynamic ad creative change with things like your age, gender or income being used to build the ad creative to make it more relevant.
Ad targeting like this obviously already occurs on the web quite extensively, and dynamic creative also exists to a lesser extent, although Placecast is unique in that they’ve systematized what has been done in various one-off instances and are focused on just one big targeting attribute which is location.
How this all pans out for Placecast is anyone guess… there is no doubt that the state of geo targeting on the web is less than ideal and Placecast provides an elegant solution for what is a problem for many advertisers. The question becomes a familiar one to many in the location industry… will this work as a stand alone entity or is it simply a feature of something bigger, something that belongs bundled in with a full service ad serving suite? I suspect that like Unicast, Pointroll, Eyeblaster and the other 3rd party rich media ad vendors out there, there really is no reason for them to exist as separate entities from larger ad servers and ad networks, yet they do… and they’re making a nice chunk of change along the way as they wait to get gobbled up and assimilated into something bigger.
