PlaceIQ: Contextualizing Location For Advertisers
I’ve been involved with a company PlaceIQ in one way or another for the better part of a year now and as their product formally launches along with the Where2.0 conference this year, it seemed like as good a time as any to do a little blurb on what it is they do and why I think its so interesting.
You’re currently not going to get much information from the website yet, other the fact that they “transform location into context”. So what does that mean exactly?
Well it may help to back up and think about how context comes into play in the world in general. Context is the just the stuff around something that helps you relate to it or understand it better. So, seeing the situation around a person or the other words around a word create context which can trigger something in your brain that help with your understanding… and advertisers hope that this context makes you more receptive to what they have to say.
The advertising world pretty much revolves around the concepts of audiences and context… in fact advertisers just love context. For many it’s not enough to just get your ad in front of a 1 million people, it needs to be the right 1 million people and ideally at a time when their brains are well tuned to whatever it is you want to tell them. Which is why an advertiser of salad dressing might choose to place ads in Better Homes & Gardens (the right audience) adjacent to their food editorial (right context) to communicate to women who may be planning the next meal for their families.
In the online world the same thing happens… if Delta wants to advertise new low prices on flights, where better to do so then in the context of a travel site? If Mattel wants to advertise their newest Spongebob licensed board game, where better to advertise it then on the pages of Nickelodeon.com (the right audience) in the Spongebob games section (right context). Contextual selling is part of the bread and butter of what media companies do.
On the web, companies like ContextWeb and Peer39 among others have built entire enterprises around the ability to understand the context of a web page, and how that may have an effect on a users receptiveness to advertising on that page.
So now about PlaceIQ. If you start to think about the world beyond magazine pages, television spots and banner ads on your PC… the world is quickly going mobile. And with this mobility comes an interesting new twist on the concept of context. Sure you may be deeply engaged in the world of Angry Birds catapulting themselves at pigs, Zombies munching on your row of spitting mushrooms, or the latest article about LeBron’s 30 point night… but sooner or later you you’ll look up and disengage from that virtual world and realize that you’re sitting in a train station, or on a beach or in your doctors office… and where you are is context too. Not only is “where you are” a somewhat unique type of context to advertisers, but potentially a very important and powerful one… after all reading about Lebron James’s lighting it up in the Garden last night on my mobile ESPN app may correctly categorize me for advertisers, but so does the fact that I am sitting on a beach in a swanky area of South Beach while doing so… in fact the “signal” that the latter data point sends is probably much more useful. It’s also something very unique and novel for the industry to wrap their heads around.
So that in essence is what PlaceIQ is all about. Gaining a deeper understanding of places… everyplace, down to a 100×100 meter ‘tile’… so that mobile and out of home advertisers can better understand the context of what is happening in those areas when it comes time to place or deliver an ad.
The PlaceIQ data is gathered from a variety of sources near and far, with the company looking at anything from sensors (ie the behind the scenes ‘reporting’ of location from mobile devices) to good old fashioned web content, as well as a number of proprietary and government data sets. Since no one data set provides the complete picture, they all compliment and reinforce one another to make the most complete picture possible.
To take it all a step further the data is also organized temporally… which as anyone that has walked into a bar at 10 o’clock in the morning knows, a bar at 10 in the morning is often quite a different place than the same bar at 10 in the evening… same goes for baseball parks during the time of a game, and a train station during the morning and evening rush hours. Spaces have different profiles at different times of day… which is important when you’re about to serving an ad hoping to reach a certain type of person.
There are seemingly any number of people that could take advantage of this type of data, but the players in the mobile advertising ecosystem are some of the first to show interest. Use of the mobile web and mobile applications is exploding, and increasingly the ad “calls” within that content can be tied back to a geographic location, and the ability to use this location data to sell and target ads more effectively creates a compelling opportunity.
In the web world there is a lot of focus these days on audience buying… in other words I don’t care if you are reading a webpage about cars, I am going to serve you an ad for a blender instead because I know you were on a cooking site earlier, or you fit the demographic profile of people who typically buys blenders because of the registration data you provided ten sites ago. This practice has always been an area of scrutiny, because it generally relies on cookie swapping to recognize users as they pass between websites.
As you might imagine when it comes to mobile location data, this is an area that becomes a lot more sensitive. For PlaceIQ, how the whole mobile cookie capabilities nets out is important but not critical… as the data is organized around places, not people. In the same way that you can infer something about a person by the web page they’re on, you can similarly infer something about a person from the geographic place they’re currently at, and the time of day that they’re there. Of course the whole thing becomes a lot more sophisticated if there is some sort of location history that tells me that you like to visit museums, or Chinese restaurants, or that you just came from a Yankees game. Even in bulk aggregated form, information that people that go here, also tend to go there holds a lot of value in the world of digital advertising. But when and if that information ever becomes a viable basis for ad delivery is still up in the air.
I guess the thing that interests me the most with the company is that for years and years the ‘web’ has been this virtual parallel world, generally disconnected from reality, where the rules were different… you were either on the web or off. Many created virtual identities, funny little virtual currencies and virtual images of themselves living their virtual Second Life. The mobile web, tied together with location can bring us collectively back from the virtual la-la land to real reality, simply Powered By the Internet. And in that world, having a deep digital collection of knowledge that describes what’s going on in that world, down to an area of a hundred meter tiles… well just seems like a pretty valuable thing to have.
Comments
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http://www.placeiq.com/2011/04/21/placeiq-contextualizing-location-for-advertisers/ PlaceIQ
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http://twitter.com/earlofmuir Chris Muir
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