Location intelligence and data management platform Precisely today announced two products to support location-based marketing. The first is an audience insights tool called Dynamic Neighborhoods. The second is Signal Engine, a tool to organize and gain insights from brands’ first-party data.
Before getting into the particulars of these new products, what is Precisely? The company has a wide range of data and insights for brand marketers (and other businesss functions) to make smarter decisions. This includes location intelligence that elevates place-based marketing.
That last part is relevant to the Localogyverse, and will also make sense for another reason: Precisely acquired longtime location intelligence leader PlaceIQ in 2022. This is where much of the company’s real-world intelligence flows from, and where its positioning as a location data player was amplified.
These moves have helped precisely secure deals with 12,000 organizations 100+ countries including 95 percent of the Fortune 100. More recently, Precisely has been aggressively integrating AI – like many others throughout the media & tech landscape – including its recent AI Engine for the physical world.
You Are Where You Go
That brings us back to today’s announcements. Taking those one at a time, Dynamic Neighborhoods is all about audience targeting. For those unfamiliar, this is the art of profiling large consumer groups, which can then be used to segment audiences for the purpose of ad targeting, among other things.
And one of the ways to profile audiences is location. In a general sense, tracking large groups of anonymized individuals (privacy friendly) can start to build segments of personas (think: business travelers, soccer moms, etc.). The thought is that the person you are is defined by the places you go.
Drilling down from that general definition of audience targeting, Precisely’s latest play brings together the company’s rich banks of demographic data and audience insights. Using Dynamic Neighborhoods, brand marketers will be able to customize their engagement strategies with well-defined audiences.
Though the use cases can be marketing-heavy, there are other endpoints and applications, such as real estate optimization or multi-location franchise development (deciding where to put your next location). Meanwhile, Dynamic Neighborhoods can be integrated through an API, flat file, or SaaS dashboard.
Valid & Compliant
Moving on to the second part of today’s announcement, Precisely’s new Signal Engine lets audiences do more with their own data. In other words, while Dynamic Neighborhoods is all about utilizing aggregate market data, location and audience segments, Signal Engine is all about brands’ first-party data.
More accurately, Signal Engine combines a company’s first party data (think: store POS data) with Precisely’s broader data to unlock brand-specific insights. It also operates securely in the cloud – as opposed to on-premise servers – so that brand marketers can act nimbly and collaboratively.
This is important because first-party data is the biggest driver of validity and compliance in the privacy-first era. Brands get into trouble with tracking and ad targeting if they use data that’s bought or used from third parties. But they’re fairly liberated to use their own customers’ opted-in data.
So the name of the game in the location-based ad tech world over the past decade has been to empower brands to do more with their first-party data. And that’s what Signal Engine does. Combined with Dynamic Neighborhoods, this one-two punch could have impact. We’ll be watching for that.
Header Image Credit: GeoJango Maps on Unsplash
