Cuebiq, Verve-HERE announcements show utility of location as targeting, attribution tool

Image courtesy Here Technologies

Location and location data are what PlaceIQ’s CEO Duncan McCall have called “horizontal enabling technologies” that can help brands with audience targeting and segmentation, business and operational insights, offline attribution and media planning.

Two recent announcements highlight the diverse and expanding uses of location, for linear TV attribution, digital out-of-home (OOH) and in-car advertising. Cuebiq announced TV attribution, which includes linear TV and so-called “advanced television.” Meanwhile, HERE and Verve announced a partnership that lays the groundwork for in-car advertising.

TV to store measurement. Cuebiq is not the first company to offer offline attribution for TV or OTT video advertising. Foursquare, Placed, PlaceIQ, Simplifil, Factual and NinthDecimal all have programs that track video content or TV programming to the store.

As with Foursquare and others, Cuebiq is working with Inscape, which is owned by TV manufacturer Vizio. The company also said it’s “the first location intelligence company to leverage Gracenote ad exposure data derived from its proprietary ACR technology running on millions of Smart TVs.” TV viewing data are matched to mobile devices in an aggregated (and anonymous) way, allowing advertisers to see which audiences were exposed to ads and then visited particular stores within a designated attribution window.

Expanding digital OOH to in-car environments. Mobile-location data company Verve and mapping and location platform HERE are seeking to extend digital out-of-home (OOH) ads to cars. HERE is providing its location data sets to Verve, which will enhance the latter’s capabilities. And the two hope to bring ads car infotainment systems.

Waze currently features multiple ad units within its navigation app, which is used predominantly in cars. And, back in 2007, now defunct connected-navigation company Dash partnered with Yahoo (and others) to offer local search content drivers. The company was paving the way for in-car ads but didn’t survive to see its vision fully realized.

HERE is doing a great deal of work on connected cars, and ads within in-dash systems are all-but-inevitable. In an earlier, related case study released by Cuebiq, the company found traditional OOH outperformed mobile-only advertising but the combination of mobile and OOH generated a more than 2X lift over OOH only.

Why you should care. These are just two examples that reflect the versatility and broad application of location data to a range of marketing scenarios. Indeed, location data should probably be a component of every brand’s marketing, regardless of whether it sells through stores or not.

Location data offers real-world behavioral and competitive insights; store visitation is one indication of purchase intent. Location data can be used across platforms to determine how all kinds of digital media are impacting offline sales — where the vast majority of transactions take place.