Harris Interactive & Placecast: Location Based Marketing Survey
Harris Interactive recently conducted a survey on behalf of Placecast digging into consumers’ preference and receptivity towards location based marketing and specifically receiving location triggered messages from businesses.
I think it is tough to read too much into these types of surveys, when you’re dealing with new technology and the general computing public because as Henry Ford said “ If you asked people what they wanted they would say ‘faster horses’”.
Nonetheless, here are some of the highlight that I could distill from the results:
- The big finding seems to be that once receiving a text alert from a merchant, 33% of respondents felt that they would be more likely to visit the physical store and 28% felt more likely to purchase the product promoted in the store. Read more
Another look at Xtify
It had been a while since I had met with a company called Xtify, and in this industry it seems that things are changing so quickly that it really pays to check back in more often to be sure a company still does what you remember them doing the last time you met. It happened for me last year with Placecast, when they seemed to switch gears between their local ad network and local creative optimization technology, to increasingly focus on mobile location based shop alerts.
Last year when I met with Xtify, I roughly understood their business as one which took location data from a mobile device and published it up to the cloud where it could then be distributed to other web and mobile applications for use in providing location relevant services. Read more
I knew it! The state of POI data does suck!
So I can still recall driving around Manhattan with my brand new Garmin device circa 2005 just playing with all the cool features and seeing what I could see… it certainly didn’t work perfect… particularly living in midtown where all those tall buildings make getting a GPS fix difficult, and where it could very easily show you a block or two off on either side, making things even a bit more confusing… something to do with signals bouncing off buildings I think.
But what resonated with me most, was chuckling at the business listings that were purported to be surrounding me as I drove down fifth avenue on to Central Park South… home to some of the toniest hotels and shops like The Plaza and Pierre Hotels. According to my Nuvi right next door to those hotels was supposed to be a place called AAA Als Towing and then a few blocks later an auto repair place… yeah right, how many auto repair and tow places do you know paying more than a few grand per square foot for such prime real estate… it was apparently the early days of POI spam, or at least a really bad dataset.
You’ve probably seen articles about the locksmith map spam problem on places like Google Maps, but its much more than that… the industry as a whole suffers from just really poor information related to documenting places… Read more
Placecast Match API
Ask a geo nerd, or Angelina Jolie, about where they are and they may geekily come back with the Latitude and Longitude of the location, but for the rest of us it’s a more imprecise description… “uh at the Mickey D’s next to the Exxon”. To McDonalds corporate that may be store #1245, to on campus students it may be the ‘ickdonalds by the dorms’ to area residents it may be the McDonalds by the university and to Google Maps it may be the business at 4151 North Central Expressway. All the same friggin place.
Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more. Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.
Placecast Teleconference, Mobile and Retailers
I listened in on the Placecast teleconference yesterday, talking about mobile technology driving retail foot traffic. There were some interesting points brought up during the discussion, a few of the most relevant:
- Consumer don’t mind giving away location as long as they get something valuable in return and they gave permission
- Texting is replacing emailing among the younger generation. Like receiving commercial email, receiving commercial texts is not seen as an intrusion as long as it was relevant and consumer gave permission
- In terms of ad delivery, location provides increased relevance… interestingly no one mentioned the consumer predisposition for acting on advertising when out and about… which I think is probably most important
- Going off and building an iPhone app is not for everyone. It’s expensive ($100k is not atypical) and overall smartphone penetration is not at scale. It makes sense for some demos more than others. Good old SMS is cheaper, easier and already at scale.
With respect to mobile meets retail specifically one of the panelists Kathryn Koegel from Primary Impact Research made mention of how consumers were often using mobile devices while IN STORE to get additional product information and reviews and to do price comparisons on the items they were shopping for. Read more
Placecast Teleconference Tomorrow: Mobile Technology and Retail
Placecast is holding another free webinar tomorrow titled Innovations in Retail: Using Mobile Technology to Drive Foot Traffic and Sales. I listened in on their earlier teleconference in May of this year and found it quite valuable. The conference is looking to bring together agencies and retailers to talk about some of the initiatives they have taken on in this space, what options are available, and why brand marketers should explore location based advertising. The panel includes a mix of folks including marketing agency Barkley, consumer products company The North Face, Primary Impact Research and of course Placecast itself.
The teleconference is free and open to the public and the panel will take live questions from listeners, but you must register first so leave a little extra time. It’s scheduled for 12:30 EST/9:30 PST so certainly worthwhile to listen in for a bit as you sit at your desk and enjoy lunch in New York or breakfast in the Bay Area.
LBS Conference-palooza
While I only attended the Where2.0 conference virtually this year, vicariously through twitter, etc, it seemed like the event covered a lot of cool stuff… fortunately for both attendees and non attendees a bunch of the presentations are posted on the O’Reilly website. If you’re already thinking ahead to the next LBS conference, it looks like Metaplaces 09 being held in San Jose, Sept 22-23 is shaping up to be a good one, potentially with more media and advertising players and a focus on monetization to it (Placecast 1020 is its Gold Sponsor). They just updated the agenda… definitely worth at look
Placecast Teleconference Post Mortem
I had a listen to the Placecast Location Based Advertising teleconference last week and Placecast has made the audio available on MP3 from their site, so you can now download it to hear the whole panel discussion… it’s worth downloading and listening to the next time you have an hour to kill while on the treadmill or on the ride home from work.
All the panelists were great and included the CEOs of NearbyNow and Placecast as well as agency and research firm representation. It was a good general backgrounder on the state of things in location based advertising and a couple of the comments by Derek Leedy from Mediasmith resonated in particular with regard to what was unique about the ability to use “location” as a criteria for delivering advertising. Derek made some observation about how the location element adds an important new element to what marketers can infer, based on ones physical surroundings, and how it allows advertisers to reach customers when they’re potentially more action oriented and in a different consideration mode than when they’re on the web… emphasizing the benefits of the real time nature and the added relevance it brings.
It reminded me in many ways of how online search advertising is different than online display advertsing… with search being more action oriented and a generally different frame of mind… and we all know how that worked out.
Scott Dunlop of NearbyNow also had some telling stats to quantify some of the lift they’ve seen from better location relevance and I was generally surprised to hear of some of the success they were seeing. The last time I used NearbyNow I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store… I decided to give NearbyNow another run, but I’ll save that for another post.
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.
Free Location Based Advertising Teleconference – Thursday May 7
I’ve been chatting with the folks at 1020 Placecast over the past couple of days, and they’ve alerted me to a teleconference they’ll be hosting next week that could be worth listening in on, particularly if you’re in the advertising industry and want to stay on top of some of the latest and greatest happening in the field. A panel including folks from 1020 Placecast, NearbyNow,
CatalystSF and Sterling Market Intelligence will be talking about location based media, current examples of its use and why and how advertisers may want to start using the technology to their advantage. The conference is free and open to the public by calling 1-712-429-0689 and using conference accesss code 610749.
Could be worth checking out… and if you think you’ll want to ask questions, be sure to have your Twitter account up and handy, as question for the event will be handled via Greg Sterling, via his Twitter, @gsterling.
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