PlaceIQ Raises $6.75 Million in Series B Financing Led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP). Mobile Location Intelligence Pioneer to Expand Reach and Service Offerings
NEW YORK, NY, May 7, 2013 PlaceIQ (http://www.PlaceIQ.com), a leading provider of location intelligence solutions for marketers, today announced the company has raised $6.75 million in a Series B financing round led by U.S. Venture Partners, and including IA Ventures, Valhalla Partners, kbs+ Ventures, and several prominent angel investors.
PlaceIQ will use the funding to further its lead as the premier location intelligence solution for marketers, and to meet the groundswell of demand for more accurate solutions that enable advertisers to reach and define mobile brand audiences at scale across a wide range of marketing activities.
“As pioneers in the space, we’ve seen first hand how location intelligence is transforming the way marketing budgets are being allocated,” said Duncan McCall, CEO & Co-Founder of PlaceIQ. “ In the past year, we’ve witnessed explosive growth in demand from both our channel partners as well as agencies and brands directly. Clearly, marketers are becoming more sophisticated and getting more and more comfortable with adding location based audiences into their marketing mix. We will be using this additional funding to cement our leadership positioning in the space, ensuring that we are able to continue to bring market defining products and measures – such as the Place Visit Rate™ to our clients.”
“Location is the critical component that allows marketers to spend their mobile marketing dollars effectively,” noted John Hadl, Venture Partner at USVP and founder of groundbreaking mobile advertising agency Brand in Hand. “PlaceIQ provides unequalled insight into this vast opportunity with its accurate and precise measures, all powered by proprietary, patent-pending solutions that have set a standard for tools that help marketers better understand how to reach and message mobile audiences. Given the opportunity here, we are excited to be leading this critical round and enabling PlaceIQ to continue to do the important, industry defining work that has been its hallmark to date.”
The several months leading up to closing of this round has seen PlaceIQ take numerous steps towards cementing its leadership position in the marketplace. These include the hiring of industry veterans Tony Nethercutt as Chief Revenue Office and Anna Nguyen as Chief Operating Officer, significant increases to its engineer staff to accommodate product demand, the announcement of the industry defining Place Visit Rate™ (PVR™) metric, as well as a strategic partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group.
“Mobile’s power and possibilities lie in its ability to harness data and deliver human experiences that are relevant and meaningful,” says Derek Thompson, Senior Vice President & Global Mobility Director at Starcom MediaVest Group. “Location science is an integral component of unleashing mobile’s potential and we are excited about our work with PlaceIQ in this space and the measurable impact we are generating for our clients.”
PlaceIQ will use the funding from this round to maintain its pace of growth, continue to expand its offering, and hire for additional positions in sales, operations, marketing, and engineering. Interested candidates should visit http://www.placeiq.com/jobs/.
For more information about Place Visit Rate™ (PVR™), PlaceIQ’s groundbreaking new success metric created that measure real-world, in-store ROI visit http://www.placeiq.com/products/pvr/
About PlaceIQ
PlaceIQ (http://www.PlaceIQ.com) is a leading provider of location intelligence, enabling advertisers to reach and define mobile brand audiences at scale for a wide range of marketing activities. Working with agencies, brands, and channel partners, PlaceIQ deploys proprietary, patent-pending big data science to aggregate and analyze extensive amounts of location data from multiple sources. The resulting intelligence gives marketers an unprecedented understanding of consumer behavior, while offering a privacy-friendly way to define, locate, reach and measure mobile audiences. The company is headquartered in New York City and has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boulder, Colorado.
About U.S. Venture Partners
U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) is a leading Silicon valley-based venture capital firm, helping entrepreneurs build world-class companies since 1981. USVP focuses on early stage opportunities in sectors where the Partners have the domain expertise, operating experience and network relationships to contribute to the success of an enterprise. Currently, the firm invests in digital communications, network systems, consumer and business services, media, semiconductors, clean technologies, biopharmaceuticals and medical devices.
About IA Ventures
IA Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm, based in NYC, that invests in companies creating competitive advantage through data. We focus on using the latest technology to manage and extract value from today’s massive, occasionally unstructured, often real-time datasets.
About Valhalla Partners
Valhalla Partners is a trusted partner and advisor to technology entrepreneurs in their quest to build world-class companies. Based in Vienna, Virginia, the firm’s management team has made more than 120 investments over the past twenty years and produced almost $1 billion of investment proceeds. Valhalla prefers investments where the mission of the company is to innovate, challenge, and fundamentally change the dynamics of new and existing markets. Investments by Valhalla’s team include Adaptly, Advertising.com, Vubiquity, JumpTap, LeftHand Networks, PlaceIQ, Progress Software, Proxicom, Qumulo, RealOps, Register.com, Riverbed Technologies, SafeNet, ServiceBench, SolidFire, Videology, Trilogy, and webMethods. Valhalla Partners brings the full power and network of its experienced team to every investment it makes, helping companies grow faster and smarter regardless of size or maturity. For more information visit http://www.ValhallaPartners.com or follow via Twitter @ValhallaVC.
About KBS+ Ventures
kbs+ Ventures is a thematic investment arm of kirshenbaum bond senecal and partners which backs early stage entrepreneurs who have solid teams and great ideas. The main investment areas that kbs+ Ventures focuses on are: ad technologies, mobile, and design infusion. For more information, please visit: http://www.kbsp.vc
Neu Venture Capital
Neu Venture Capital is a New York-based seed fund run by Jerry Neumann. For more information please visit: http://neuvc.com
Organizations partner to bring more mobile solutions to market
[NEW YORK, April 4, 2013] Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) and PlaceIQ announced today the launch of a new mobile solution that will help SMG clients to measure the effectiveness of mobile advertising. Known as Place Visit Rate™, this is the first offering from a new strategic partnership between SMG and PlaceIQ to bring best-in-class mobile solutions to SMG clients.
Place Visit Rate™ refers to the ratio of people who view mobile advertising for a physical retailer and subsequently are observed in that store.
Place Visit Rate™ (PVR™) is a unique KPI in that it not only measures the effectiveness of mobile advertising’s ability to drive in-store traffic, but also gives marketers the ability to optimize towards it. Starcom MediaVest Group and PlaceIQ developed PVR™ as a key performance indicator during a recent campaign for a leading brand. The breakthrough mobile campaign and KPI was successful in proving that contextually relevant, location-based messaging, was successful in driving increased store traffic.
“Mobile’s true potential relies on the ability to harness data and connect with consumers at the right place and the right time with the right message to drive a specific action,” says Derek Thompson, Senior Vice President & Global Mobility Director at Starcom MediaVest Group. “We are very excited about our ground-breaking work with PlaceIQ and the measurable impact we are generating for our clients.”
By partnering together, Starcom MediaVest Group and PlaceIQ are able to combine the best thinking in technology and human experience to innovate and solve some of the most pressing issues concerning today’s leading brands.
As a company that pioneered the application of location intelligence to mobile marketing, PlaceIQ continues to lead by innovation in mobile audience science. They have built a suite of solutions designed to help marketers identify, engage and learn more about key audience segments as they move throughout the physical world.
“We developed PVR™ because we saw an area of mobile that was lacking: providing a clear way of measuring and impacting the success of a brand driving consumers into their stores via mobile advertising,” says Duncan McCall, CEO & Co-founder of PlaceIQ. “Our DNA is very much about innovating on behalf of our clients. When Starcom MediaVest Group came to us for this collaboration, we knew it was time to roll up our sleeves and create a solution that would help the entire industry understand real-world, measurable ROI.”
About Starcom MediaVest Group
Starcom MediaVest Group is the Human Experience Company. We grow our clients’ business by transforming human behavior through uplifting, meaningful human experiences. These brand ‘experiences’ are brought to life by SMG’s three global agency brands: MediaVest, Starcom, and Spark. Ranked one of the largest brand communications groups in the world, Starcom MediaVest Group (www.smvgroup.com) encompasses an integrated network of human experience strategists, investment specialists, content creators and digital experts. With nearly 6,500 employees in 110 offices worldwide, SMG partners with the world’s leading companies including The Coca-Cola Company, Kraft Foods, P&G, Samsung, Walmart, among others. In 2010, Adweek named SMG “Media Agency of the Decade.”
SMG is part of Publicis Groupe [Euronext Paris: FR0000130577], the world’s third largest communications group. Publicis Groupe is also ranked as the world’s second largest media counsel and buying group and is the first global network in digital and healthcare communications. Website: www.publicisgroupe.com
About PlaceIQ
PlaceIQ (www.PlaceIQ.com) is a leading provider of location intelligence, enabling advertisers to reach and define mobile brand audiences at scale for a wide range of marketing activities. Working with agencies, brands, and channel partners, PlaceIQ deploys proprietary, patent-pending big data science to aggregate and analyze extensive amounts of location data from multiple sources. The resulting intelligence gives marketers an unprecedented understanding of consumer behavior, while offering a privacy-friendly way to define, locate, reach and measure mobile audiences. Founded in 2010, the company has offices in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Boulder, Colorado.
With Spring upon us, signifying a time of rebirth, rejuvenation and regrowth, we at PlaceIQ are experiencing much of the same. As pioneers and leaders in mobile location intelligence, the idea of constant evolution and change is baked into our philosophy. We pride ourselves on never staying complacent, and always trying to push the needle and develop tools, approaches and advancements that move forward the goals of our clients.
We have a slew of exciting updates in our 2013 pipeline, including a number of new offerings produced or being developed that we are strategically rolling out over the next few months.
Today, I’m here to let you in on our latest that we are very bullish on, and that’s Place Visit Rate™.
Place Visit Rate™ aka PVR™, is a revolutionary new patent-pending mobile KPI that not only measures the effectiveness of mobile advertising’s ability to drive in-store traffic, but also gives marketers the ability to optimize towards it.
Place Visit Rate™ defined: The ratio of people who viewed mobile ads for a physical retailer and subsequently were observed in that store.
We developed this new KPI because we saw the need for mobile marketers to, for the first time, actually verify real-world, measureable ROI. We proved Place Visit Rate™ in a holiday campaign we ran for a leading brand. The results of which were quite impressive. The metric was validated through a traditional A/B test (PIQ targeted ads) and control (no ad shown) model that demonstrated that users shown brand specific targeted mobile ads were more likely to visit that brand’s store. We also showed that those consumers who clicked on our client’s ad were more likely to visit its stores than users simply exposed to the ad. In short, creative (and engagement) matters!
Place Visit Rate™ and the tools we use to measure it can also reveal a tremendous amount of valuable intelligence for marketers. We have tested ads targeted to specific competitive retailers, (conquesting) via our proprietary “polygoning” methodology, as well as ads targeted to audiences. We also proved that unlike CTR, PVR™ is improved by frequency! The limits of this capability are truly extensive and we believe this will change the way the industry looks at and values mobile.
Spring, regrowth, it’s palpable and we’re literally seeing it as our team has expanded from 16 to 36 in the last three months. There is certainly a lot to be excited about. I’m pleased to be able to reveal this new KPI with you (see the Ad Age article, read about it on our website), but this is just one of many announcements we have planned for the year. Stay tuned.
Combines with Vistar Media (Ad Serving) Partnership to Produce Tool to Help Marketers More Effectively Reach Consumers On-the-Go
NEW YORK, [2/27/13]—Spafax Networks announced today it has reached an agreement to integrate PlaceIQ’s audience intelligence platform into the SN: Xchange for real-time serving and reporting of ads running on digital place-based media networks. Combined with its previously announced partnership with Vistar Media’s ad serving platform, SN: Xchange now offers marketers a single, comprehensive solution to effectively reach on-the-go consumers
PlaceIQ ingests a multitude of geo-encoded data sources to infer audience, context and intent, broken down by time and day, enabling marketers to identify their target consumers as they move around their physical worlds. PlaceIQ accounts for different moments in the consumer’s life, enabling them to measure, optimize and deliver the right advertising message at the right time.
“The integration of PlaceIQ into SN: Xchange gives us a third component of Intelligent Inventory that rounds out our solution for advertisers looking to reach today’s on-the-go consumer,” said Patrick Bonomo, executive vice president, Spafax Networks. “With PlaceIQ, we have added a filter that enables us to ascribe likely consumer behavior to our intelligent media inventory.”
“We are excited to be partnering with such a forward-thinking company as Spafax Networks,” said Duncan McCall, PlaceIQ CEO and co-founder. “What we’ve built is an audience intelligence platform, based on vast amounts of location data, that allows for an unparalleled understanding of consumer behavior. We believe these capabilities, combined with the incredible inventory of the SN: Xchange, allows advertisers access to the most powerful and intelligent targeting solution on the market.”
About PlaceIQ
PlaceIQ builds audience segments for advertisers by aggregating large amounts of location data from multiple data sources to understand what behaviors, people, and activities exist in a given place and time. This location targeting solution is a powerful, privacy friendly way to define, reach, and learn about specific audiences in the world they live in. The company was founded in 2010, with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Boulder, Colorado.
About Spafax Networks
Spafax Networks, a division of WPP’s tenthavenue, was founded in 2012 with a mission to become the leading global company targeting on-the-go audiences and influencing purchase outcomes across multiple channels and devices.
Spafax Networks’ initial offering is a buying solution for digital placed-based media. As advertisers continue to look for new digitally-capable screens to include in their addressable media plans, Spafax Networks is using a technology and buying methodology solution that can serve inventory — via a demand-side platform, or DSP— in the previously uncharted territory of digital placed-based networks. The Spafax platform optimizes campaigns by identifying target consumers down to the sub-block level and enabling buys to be placed in a biddable, real-time marketplace.
Case Study: PlaceIQ Drives 118% Lift of In-Store Sales for Major CPG Brand
PlaceIQ, Medialets and FRWD Team Up to Drive 118% Lift of In-Store Sales for Major CPG Brand Through Mobile Ad Campaign
PlaceIQ, the mobile audience company, along with Medialets, the essential platform for mobile advertising, and FRWD, a leader in Shopper & Mobile marketing reveal how their innovative approach to mobile marketing was able to directly spike in-store sales for CPG client, Meguiar’s (an auto care products brand owned by 3M)
Campaign Objective
Build a multi-faceted mobile ad campaign to drive in-store sales
Leverage all the benefits unique to mobile (SMS, rich capabilities like “touch”, barcode scanning and, most importantly, location and audience)
Approach
Meguiar’s agency, FRWD, engaged PlaceIQ and Medialets for the mobile advertising campaign.
PlaceIQ determined optimal markets to support based on Meguiar’s sales data, customer sales data, target population and market share. Using Place Context, they identified the best places and times to reach relevant auto audiences.
These highly targeted consumers were then served a truly rich mobile advertising experience, created, served and measured by Medialets. The rich media iPhone ad unit initiated a banner that prompted users to “tap” to learn more about a special offer and find a store. When tapped, the banner expanded to reveal a dirty car that a user could ‘clean’ by wiping the screen with their finger. The ad unit emulated the experience of using Meguiar’s Car Wax in a fun and interactive way and helped drive users to retail.
Results
Analysis of Meguiar’s in-store retail sales for both control markets and exposed markets revealed the following compelling results achieved:
Market Level Sales lift:
118% Sales lift for exposed markets over controlled markets in retail sales
Engagement Metrics:
Rich Media Unit engagement
109% lift in response rates (CTR) with location enhanced data compared with non-location enhanced units
Engagement rate = 2X Medialets’ benchmarks
150% lift in response rates compared to standard banner averages
Mobile Site Engagement
21% watched “How-To” videos on the go
20% used the Store Locator
83% browsed products
Insights and Intelligence:
The Meguiar’s campaign was successful in proving that mobile advertising can effectively drive in-store sales.
Added Value: PlaceIQ was able to unlock and report upon a wealth of learning’s and insights around audience engagement. Among the highlights were that College Students and Young Adults were the most engaged audience segments in the Houston market; whereas in Orlando, families and Senior’s made up the most engaged audience. These new and powerful learning’s allow for direct messaging and strategy to specific audiences in specifics markets in the future
Multi-Faceted Marketing: This campaign exemplifies the true opportunity of intelligent, targeted, mobile marketing. Not only by efficiently targeting a specific audience with the right rich and engaging message, at the right time and place, but also by capturing the real success of this approach – moving consumers all the way through the path to purchase, while being able to measure and provide insights on that closed loop
Bright Outlook: We believe this represents mobile-specific innovation in measurement, targeting, Shopper Marketing and collaborative integration. Moreover, with this just Meguiar’s second year experimenting with mobile marketing, this success bodes extremely well for the adoption of mobile in general.
PlaceIQ is excited to announce the addition of Tony Nethercutt to its executive team! Tony’s role as Chief Revenue Officer will be to oversee the build out of PlaceIQ’s sales, account management and ad operations teams, as well as manage all publisher and ad network partnerships. Tony will be based out of San Francisco, California. For more, check out our official press release below:
NEW YORK, NY – PlaceIQ announced today that it has appointed Tony Nethercutt to its senior executive team as Chief Revenue Officer. Nethercutt, formerly VP of Sales at YouTube and AdMob, joins PlaceIQ having spent the past two years as General Manager of North America for mobile advertising firm Mojiva Inc.. Nethercutt will oversee the build out of PlaceIQ’s sales, account management and ad operations teams, as well as manage all publisher and ad network partnerships.
Nethercutt commented: “After a very rewarding period at Mojiva and Mocean Mobile, I am very excited to be joining PlaceIQ. The company’s highly unique approach to delivering targeted mobile audiences based on a complex analysis of location, time of day, and many other relevant data points is extremely intriguing and compelling. Working with really smart people internally, and with advertisers and ad agencies to bring a new way of leveraging advertising to influence audiences is always a good time for me. I expect to have a ton of fun at PlaceIQ.”
Since its founding in 2010, PlaceIQ has emerged as the market leader in the mobile audience and location intelligence field. In the process, the company has forged strong partnerships with mobile industry leaders including The Weather Company, Jumptap, Verve Wireless and others, and has worked directly with leading brands across all major industries to drive significant increases in in-store sales and produce award-winning campaigns. The addition of Nethercutt to the executive team promises to strengthen PlaceIQ’s position at the forefront of the emerging mobile ad tech industry.
“Tony is a perfect addition to PlaceIQ as we intensify our efforts to expand our national presence,” said Duncan McCall, Co-founder and CEO of PlaceIQ. “We are in full growth mode as we enter 2013 and feel that Tony’s vision, track record and knowledge of the digital ecosystem fully complement the goals of our company. We are indeed very excited to welcome him on board.”
“We’ve partnered with some very big brands and delivered extremely successful and measured results,” says McCall. “We believe our technology has even stronger reaches, beyond just mobile, and feel we are just scratching the surface of what our company can be.”
In joining Place IQ, Nethercutt is reteaming with former Admob, Quatrro and Millennial Media adviser and current JumpTap Board member John Hadl, who led US Venture Partner’s recent investment in PlaceIQ.
About PlaceIQ (http://www.placeiq.com)
PlaceIQ builds mobile audiences for advertisers by aggregating large amounts of location data from multiple data sources to understand what behaviors, people, and activities exist in a given place and time. This location context targeting is a powerful, privacy friendly way to define, reach, and learn about specific audiences in a mobile world. The company was founded in 2010, with offices in New York City and Boulder, Colorado.
Founded in 2010, PlaceIQ provides location intelligence for mobile advertising and other markets. The company’s flagship product, PlaceContext, extracts contextual intelligence generated from large amounts of location based data such as place data, event data, digital, mobile and social data – as well as a diversity of other location specific information. PlaceIQ performs a series of data cleansing, normalization, analysis, and machine learning processes to extract an understanding of the type of audience present in a specific location at a specific time – enabling the ability to audience target in mobile highly effectively.
The Business Challenges
The service’s back-end data tier has to be able to process vast amounts of data and handle real-time and mobile demands. It is critical that PlaceIQ has a highly scalable and efficient caching layer. Prior to using a caching solution, the data tier sent every request to fulfillment servers. The company considered deploying its own memcached infrastructure to create a caching solution.
Why Amazon Web Services
PlaceIQ decided to use Amazon ElastiCache because “Amazon ElastiCache provided a turn-key approach to installing, managing, and scaling a large memcached cluster,” says Steve Milton, CTO and co-founder of PlaceIQ. Amazon ElastiCache allowed PlaceIQ to quickly implement and deploy a caching layer infrastructure within their existing application stack.
PlaceIQ’s existing data tier includes a RESTful interface for data retrieval. To employ Amazon ElastiCache and the memcached based protocol with the RESTful based web service, PlaceIQ uses a caching proxy layer with a Nginx web server and a corresponding Nginx memcached plugin. The diagram below demonstrates the site architecture.
Figure 1: PlaceIQ Site Architecture
The caching proxy layer hashes the requested uniform resource identifier (URI) and then queries the corresponding node within the Amazon ElastiCache group. The solution uses Elastic Load Balancing to distribute traffic across the Nginx caching proxy web servers running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
This URI hashing strategy eliminates redundant copies of cached data in the Amazon ElastiCache cluster. If the requested URI is not found within Amazon ElastiCache, the request is forwarded to a set of origin servers for fulfillment. The resulting response from the origin server is placed in Amazon ElastiCache for future use. The PlaceIQ team uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the different components of PlaceIQ’s distributed architecture.
The Business Benefits
“After deploying Amazon ElastiCache, PlaceIQ’s average end-to end response time for its web services improved by 83%,” says Milton. “Furthermore, we are saving $1,000 per month in direct costs. Amazon ElastiCache allows us to improve our service response times rapidly and economically for our customers. This in turn allows us to serve customer demand with fewer backend servers reducing our cost.”
To learn more about how AWS can help support your in-memory caching needs, visit our AWS ElastiCache product detail page: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/.
In partnering with PlaceIQ, The Weather Channel became the first publisher to launch a ground-breaking mobile audience ad targeting solution, which can target down to a city block. High-profile launch sponsors include Chevy Silverado, Frito-Lay, and Ram Trucks.
The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) announced today it will be the first publisher to partner with hyperlocal data company PlaceIQ to provide advertisers with groundbreaking new hyperlocal audience targeting that can deliver highly contextually relevant ads to consumers at the right place and time. With 30 million monthly mobile users, The Weather Channel is one of the few publishers with a large enough mobile audience to offer true hyperlocal audience targeting at scale. This targeting is now available on The Weather Channel iPhone App and will be rolling out on The Weather Channel Android App in July and all mobile platforms later this year.
The product is launching with a number of high profile advertisers, including Chevy Silverado, Frito-Lay, and the Ram Truck brand, among others.
“Consumers expect to receive the most accurate local weather news and information when they use The Weather Channel mobile products, which gives us the opportunity – and our advertisers the advantage – to deliver messages highly targeted to their location that will feel completely organic to their user experience,” said Patrick McCormack, vice president, mobile sales and strategy, The Weather Channel Companies. “We feel strongly that our premium content and ability to target a specific mobile audience provides an unparalleled ad solution to our advertising clients.”
PlaceIQ extracts intelligence from large amounts of place, social and mobile location-based data to create hyperlocal, targetable audience profiles informed by time of day as well as location, giving advertisers the power to connect with consumers at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. These anonymous audience profiles can provide powerful targeting opportunities for advertisers. For example, financial services clients can target ads to mobile phones in areas with a high propensity for business travelers such as airports during peak commuting hours, or in areas with a high concentration of hotels in the morning or evening that score high for business travelers. A QSR can serve an ad on The Weather Channel app during lunch on mobile phones on certain blocks populated with office workers, or serve an ad targeting late-night diners in an area that has a high concentration of nightlife and social activity. To view a video explaining the product, click here: http://wxch.nl/JklbBq.
This new targeting offers several advantages for advertisers. First, a recent Internet2Go study confirmed that, despite claims of ZIP code or latitudinal-longitudinal targeting capabilities, most mobile ad networks can’t deliver local impressions more focused than the Designated Market Area (DMA) or city level.** In fact, only about 5% to 10% of mobile display impressions carry a lat-long today.*** By contrast, The Weather Channel Mobile provides advertisers with a 100% hyperlocal inventory.
Another key advantage of PlaceIQ‘s hyperlocal solution is that it’s inherently privacy friendly, as it profiles locations – not users – through analysis of anonymous location data. There is no identification of individual users, or any usage of personally identifiable information. Data is accumulated through place, event and social information, as well as digital behavior associated with each location.
“The combination of PlaceIQ‘s hyperlocal audience targeting, with The Weather Channel’s tremendous reach and ability to transform hyperlocal impressions into specific audiences, is an extremely powerful one. The combination of weather, location and audience creates a set of offerings we think represent true innovation in mobile advertising, and we’re extremely excited to partner with The Weather Channel to deliver this to market,” said Duncan McCall, CEO and co-founder, PlaceIQ.
About The Weather Channel Companies
The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC) are made up of The Weather Channel® television network, The Weather Channel digital properties, and WSI. The Weather Channel is based in Atlanta and is seen in more than 100 million U.S. households. TWCC also operates Weatherscan®, a 24-hour all-local weather network; The Weather Channel Radio Network; and The Weather Channel HD. The most popular source of weather news and information, TWCC properties reach 60 million monthly Web consumers (weather.com and Desktop) and 30 million monthly mobile users (mobile Web and applications) and offers the second most popular mobile app on all smartphones. WSI, headquartered in Andover, MA, primarily provides business-to-business weather services, particularly for the media, aviation, marine and energy sectors. TWCC is owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. For more information, visit www.weather.com/press.
About PlaceIQ
PlaceIQ is a provider of “Next Generation Location Intelligence.” Extracting meaning and context from the huge explosion of “new” location data being created – PlaceIQ enables the detailed dynamic understanding of a place or location like never before. For more information, visit http://www.placeiq.com/.
Jumptap and PlaceIQ Bring Mobile Location Targeting to Leading Retailer
JUMPTAP AND PLACEIQ BRING MOBILE LOCATION TARGETING TO LEADING RETAILER
Mobile and Hyper-Local Leaders Go Beyond Geo-Fencing to Deliver Enhanced Mobile Audience Targeting
NEW YORK and CAMBRIDGE, MA. May 22, 2012 – Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, today announced the continued success and integration of its partnership with [mobile location] leader PlaceIQ. The two companies worked together on a number of innovative mobile advertising campaigns in Q1 of 2012.
In February 2012, Jumptap and PlaceIQ worked with ad agency Hill Holliday to target audiences for a leading retail client. The goal of the campaign was to drive in-store traffic and sales to specific retail locations in a number of major markets. The audience focus was on women between the ages of 35-54, home décor, DIY, women’s lifestyle content, and more. Rather than just ‘geo-fencing’ store locations, the client looked to Jumptap and PlaceIQ to target audiences that fit their demographic profile and over-indexed for likelihood to visit their stores. If the campaign had been deployed through geo-fencing alone, it would have significantly reduced the campaign reach. However, using PlaceIQ’s contextual approach, the campaign was able to deliver hyper-local targeting at scale, in addition to consumer intent.
Throughout the campaign, Jumptap and PlaceIQ optimized the retailer’s hyper-local placements, which resulted in continuously improving performance in each targeted segment. In New York and Chicago, for example, virtual grids of 100 meter x 100 meter tiles were established via Place IQ’s proprietary location technology. PlaceIQ focused on grids closest to entertainment venues to determine devices that over-indexed for a likelihood to enjoy dining out, movie and theater-going. Such audiences received an over-weighting of impressions in the campaign. Overall, the retailer saw a 41.21% CTR lift in New York and 51.47% CTR lift in Chicago over non-hyper-local targeting.
“PlaceIQ and Jumptap offered an exceptional data driven targeting ability that understood physical locations with a level of context that was only possible through mobile advertising,” said Johnny Won, Manager of Mobile & Gaming Platforms, Hill Holliday. “While networks and agencies love to geo-fence, we loved having an entirely new capability to think about the location data layer with PlaceIQ.”
“Advertisers have seen significant campaign lift by overlaying third-party data from Jumptap’s unique offline partnerships,” said Paran Johar, Chief Marketing Officer at Jumptap. “Our exclusive relationship with PlaceIQ goes beyond standard geo-fencing to offer hyper-local audience targeting to connect brands and advertisers with a larger group of a specific audience type.”
PlaceIQ transforms ‘location into context’ by ingesting large amounts of unstructured, unrelated, anonymous, location-based data types such as photos, place, event, digital, social and more. After cleansing and normalizing vast amounts of data, PlaceIQ then extracts patterns, trends, intelligence and context. The resulting hyper-local ‘location profiles’ (down to a city block) suggest the likely context and behavior of an anonymous user or device. When coupled with time and location, these anonymous profiles can provide powerful targeting opportunities. The Jumptap-PlaceIQ offering makes it easier for advertisers to reach precise grids that are most likely to have a high concentration of people at work, luxury shoppers, tourists, students, travelers, and more.
Jumptap and PlaceIQ announce hyper local partnership.
CAMBRIDGE, MA and NEW YORK, NY. February 21, 2012 – Jumptap, the leader in targeted mobile advertising, and PlaceIQ a hyper local audience company, today announced a partnership centered around hyper-local audience targeting.
PlaceIQ transforms ‘location into context’ by ingesting large amounts of unstructured, unrelated, anonymous location-based data types such as photos, place, event, digital, social and more. After cleansing and normalizing vast amounts of data, PlaceIQ then extracts patterns, trends, intelligence and context. The resulting hyper-local ‘location profiles’ (down to a city block) suggest the likely context and behavior of an anonymous user, or device. When coupled with time and location, these anonymous profiles can provide powerful targeting opportunities.
The Jumptap-PlaceIQ offering will make it easier for advertisers to reach precise grids that are most likely to contain people at work, luxury shoppers, tourists, students, travelers, and more. This approach is privacy-friendly, as PlaceIQ profiles locations not users, and no personally identifiable information is gathered, stored or used. As smartphones proliferate, retailers are recognizing the power of location awareness to drive foot traffic and in-store behaviors. The Jumptap-PlaceIQ partnership is squarely aimed at delivering on this promise for retailers.
To further strengthen Jumptap’s position with retail advertisers and brands, the company appointed Matthew Mulderink as Director of Retail. “Jumptap’s retail business experienced explosive growth in 2011, and retailers who leveraged our unique third-party data to target specific audience segments during the holiday season saw significant performance uplift,” said Todd Anderman, Chief Media and Revenue Officer, Jumptap. “Matthew’s retail expertise combined with our retail insights, existing third-party data relationships, and the addition of PlaceIQ’s hyper-location data will help our retail partners further integrate targeted mobile advertising into their overall media mix and increase sales.
About Jumptap
Jumptap is the leader in targeted mobile advertising. Reaching 95 million mobile users in the U.S. and 142 million mobile users worldwide, Jumptap uses its extensive technology portfolio, as well as industry-first partnerships with third- party data providers, to understand mobile audiences better than any other ad network and provide intelligent targeting with scale. Through its large network of premium publishers and apps, and constant campaign optimization, Jumptap delivers the best ROI for advertisers and highest yield for publishers and developers. Jumptap has pioneered mobile advertising privacy standards and is committed to unlocking mobile opportunities for all parties through its ongoing industry research, such as its Understanding Mobile Audience series and monthly MobileSTAT report. Visit http://www.jumptap.com and http://www.jumptap.com/blog for more information; join our Facebook community, follow us on Twitter at @Jumptap and check out our latest ads at the Jumptap Ad Gallery http://www.jumptap.com/gallery.
