PlaceIQ, Rentrak Use Mobile Location To Boost TV Ratings

Retailers, restaurants and hotels have tapped mobile location data to better drive foot traffic, but the case for media brands to do the same to drive audience growth isn’t immediately as clear. That’s until you consider the growing trend toward tying together user data across platforms.

In that vein, media agency Media Storm, location technology firm PlaceIQ and TV ratings firm Rentrak this spring conducted a test with a national sports network to increase tune-in for Major League Baseball games. 

In what they call a first-of-its-kind campaign, mobile location data from PlaceIQ was matched with TV set-top box data from Rentrak to target ads to the mobile phones of heavy MLB viewers across Fox Sports 1, Fox, the MLB Network, ESPN and TBS. Ads mainly took the form of in-app banners.

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The companies declined to identify the sports network client, and ESPN did not respond to a media inquiry about the test. MLB wasn’t directly involved in the trial campaign that ran from April 6 to May 3 this year--the first to use PlaceIQ’s new PIQ PrimeTime service for targeting mobile devices based on TV viewership.

In terms of results, the effort led to a nearly 25% increase in viewershlp among those exposed to the ads within the target demographic, versus a control group. That the mobile ad could have that much of an impact on viewing is likely to generate skepticism, however, pending more extensive testing.

PlaceIQ also said MLB viewers exposed to the ad spent an incremental nine minutes watching on the sports network. Through its location targeting platform, the company can link mobile devices to households based on the frequency with which a device appears inside a given residential location.

From that data, it can infer where a mobile owner lives. That information is then correlated with the household viewer data from Rentrak, which spans 26 million U.S. set-top-box homes.

“This marks the first time our massive and passive TV viewing information has been used for attribution with a location-based mobile marketing campaign and opens the door for future innovative uses of our unique data set,” said Chris Wilson, president of national television at Rentrak, in a statement.

The campaign results showed that MLB viewers are most likely to be age 34 or over, in middle-income, family households. In terms of  lifestyle habits, they tend to prefer quick-service restaurants for dining, and Costco over other big box retailers for shopping. MLB viewers are also more likely than average to spend to spend leisure time outdoors.

PlaceIQ collects that type of behavioral information from a range of data sources, including the U.S. census, public social data and mobile location information, to create audience profiles for areas as small as 100 meters square. It uses proprietary algorithms to analyze data, along with time-of-day information, to score each 100-meter “tile” against a given demographic.

The company received $15 million in a third-round venture funding earlier this year led by Harmony Partners. PlaceIQ has a strategic partnership with Publicis’ VivaKi, but the arrangement doesn’t preclude it from working with other agencies like Media Storm, the media buying unit of the Water Cooler Group. 

Charlie Fiordalis, head of digital at MediaStorm, said the company is now talking with other entertainment clients about running campaigns using the PIQ Primetime service.

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