Commentary
Ground Signal's Tony Longo On Location As Key To New Attribution Models
- by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, December 29, 2015
RTBlog asked Tony Longo, co-founder and CEO of Ground Signal, a location-based audience platform, to look into his crystal ball for 2016. Here are some of his predictions:
Location will be a key player in new attribution models. “2016 will witness a huge push toward more robust attribution models. Location will be one of the key reasons that new attribution models leapfrog existing ones with a new level of precision.
"As mobile and social continue to scale, location has transformed a simple data point into a rich data layer. I predict that several companies will design/evolve platforms to allow marketers to better predict advertising’s effect on buying decisions before the end of the year.”
Marketers will get closer to the omnichannel Holy Grail. “Marketing is no longer about broadcasting. It’s a two-way conversation. Omnichannel strategies will bring personalization to a whole new level as marketers demand access to insights available through one centralized platform. Increasingly, performance will be tied to insights and activations with the end goal: genuine one-to-one, personalized conversations.”
Marketers will use social media to drive merchandising. “The advent of the buy button, with access to real world audiences and influencers in specific locations, will elevate social media from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’. Without a social strategy, marketers will miss the opportunity to understand existing and potential customers. They will miss the opportunity to engage prospects, understand pain points in real-time and drive ROI.
There will be an avalanche of consolidations ahead for mobile and video technology. “We’ll continue to see consolidation as larger players acquire mobile and video platforms in the coming year to round out their platform offerings.”
Tobi Elkin is the Editor of MediaPost's Real-Time Daily and the RTBlog. You can reach Tobi at telkin@mediapost.com.
A lot of the so-called "addressable" media targeting schemes seem to rely on geographical location---finely cut, of course---as their primary way of defining who is in or out of the market for various products or services. The trouble with this is the assumption that everyone in a given area which seems to match the desired demographics of an advertiser's prime consumers----mainly income, ethnicity/race and age of household head----is, indeed a prospective buyer. While the averaqge person in said areas may be more likely to be the target, in reality only some actually are, while many are not. The only way to get around this and make the targeting more efficient is to slice and dice the geographics down to extremely "granular" levels---like block by block or neighborhood by neighborhood. But is such detail really available and, if so, can the media really be sold so selectively? For example, what happens if almost every advertiser wants the upper income areas but there is little interest in the downscale regions? Doesn't this create the danger of a glut of ads directed at upscale homes? Finally, can a media seller make do by exploiting only a portion of its total "impression inventory" ? How does it sell off the unwanted or very low demand regions?