Years ago, PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall was one of the very first to recognize the significance of location data, not just for ad targeting but as a tool for a wide range of audience and business insights. Those include competitive intelligence, benchmarking, foot-traffic anaytics and media planning.
Now the company has formally launched a platform it calls LandMark. It seeks to make a massive trove of location data and associated insights easily accessible to brands and agencies without the need for an internal team of data scientists. Last week, the company announced the offering and a number of partners: Ansible, Gas Station TV (GSTV), Havas Media, The Media Kitchen and others.
LandMark is license- or subscription-based and can be accessed through PlaceIQ’s dashboard or through an API and integrated with existing customer tools.
What’s most fascinating is that the primary use case is not necessarily advertising but business and customer intelligence. McCall told me over the phone that LandMark is representative in his mind of a kind of “phase three” of location data. The first phase was geofencing, the second phase was audience segmentation, and now the third phase is business intelligence and customer insights, according to McCall.
PlaceIQ envisions the data informing a wide range of business functions and operations: media planning, cross-channel marketing strategy, competitive positioning, retail site selection optimization and financial investments. Here are the things PlaceIQ says LandMark can inform or provide:
Understanding of customer behavior and segments (e.g., loyalists and lapsed customers)
Competitive intelligence and share-of-visits analysis
Equity analysis: foot traffic patterns and share-of-visit reports to predict quarterly sales
Retail site selection: understand sites with “high potential for expansion based on customer loyalty”
A range of other companies (more than a dozen) offer location-based data and insights. However, McCall argues that LandMark is unique in its depth, accuracy and usability.
What’s important to understand is that location data is now a flexible tool that goes way beyond geofencing and can be used for targeting, analytics and competitive insights. And those brands and agencies that aren’t utilizing this data will ultimately be at a competitive disadvantage compared with those that do.
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