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. Read more
Local and Hyperlocal Search, Not Really Google’s to Lose?
You hear so much about location based apps and social networking tied back to location, but significantly less so about location based search. Everyone seems to just assume that its going to be Google, or maybe Bing stepping up to own the location based search opportunity. But I think there is a nice opportunity for a start up to step in… because as with most every company that has seen some success in doing things a certain way, it seems quite difficult for them to re think the way their business should operate to address a new market… generally preferring to shove the new thing into the way they’ve always done the old thing. And I think that’s going to happen again with local search.
One of the pieces of news that was making the rounds over the past week, at least in my little corner of the twitter-sphere was news that Watson a computer system baked up by the fun folks at IBM beat the pants off two of the all time best players on the popular trivia show Jeopardy. Like its predecessor Deeper Blue in 1997 who beat the pants off of the then world’s best human chess champion… Watson was designed from the ground up to perform a specific task, and to do it quite well thanks to modern capabilities around processing power, data storage and hundreds of simultaneous algorithms tasked with interpreting the natural human language.
But reading a bit more of the press about the event, something caught my eye, a reference to the fact that Watson doesn’t even use the Internet. Read more
Mobile Location Data and the Advertising Targeting Opportunity
So I’ve been getting a re-education recently on the latest and greatest in digital ad networks and targeting. Things like behavioral targeting and re-targeting have been around with us for ages, even before the Doubleclick & Abacus Direct controversies of the dot com boom years over a decade ago. But for whatever reason, the whole hyper targeting and re targeting seems to have been placed back on the front burner of the industry, thanks in large part to the availability of inventory via advertising exchanges and the success that ad networks have seen in recent years… both of which have attracted a new category of entrants, including advertisers and agencies alike, back to the space.
So to those not in that industry here is the best I can do in summarizing what’s going on here.
The amount of display ad inventory available online is absolutely massive… far more than the supply of advertising dollars chasing it… so the price someone is willing to pay to serve any old advertisement to a random Internet user is pretty negligible. Meanwhile, the internet advertising industry long ago went down the path of selling itself as a data intensive, highly measurable and result oriented medium… and for better or worse is generally stuck with that description.
So… the name of the game nowadays is to not just serve anyone on the Internet any old ad and call it a day, but to serve a very specific group of people, sometimes a very specific ad, and measure what happened afterwards to see if it ‘worked’ in terms of driving clicks or purchases… rinsing and repeating until one gets the desired result or gives up and tries for a new result instead. The more highly correlated a given piece of information is with some desired activity like a click or purchase, the more valuable it is. Read more
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