Location data has played a key role in enabling many of our campaigns. Understanding people’s mobility behavior helps us develop better insights, especially for targeting purposes. Due to the pandemic, the travel industry has come to a standstill. This is the challenge faced by one of our biggest clients, German Rail. Being a stateowned company, German Rail has been told to keep all trains running, but with most people working from home, it’s making huge losses every month. Their focus now will be on rebuilding trust and making people feel safe to travel again. For such campaigns we use location data, in combination with other data, to gain insights into passengers’ travel behavior — how do they travel, whether they travel long distances, are they business travelers, and so on.
“Georeferencing location data helps us know the hotspots to be avoided and the areas where people are likely to hang out.”
Designing impactful campaigns
When it comes to brands like Coca-Cola and Radeberger Beer Group (Germany’s largest brewer), another big client of ours, the equation changes. For these brands, their primary revenue comes from B2B sales. With bars and restaurants closed, and big events and public gatherings suspended, their businesses are suffering. For them, our campaigns are focused on the idea of people going out again once the summer arrives. We use location data from social media to identify the areas where people are likely to hang out in the summer and feature them in our campaigns. We also have a vegan food client who prepares readymade meals for lunch. Location data helps us learn when people are in the office or at home, and where they spend most of their time. Based on the time of the day we play ads for them, especially on social media, about half an hour before they go to the supermarket.
Obtaining actionable insights
Location data helps us drive business through a mix of insights. For instance, if people go to a special event like the European Cup, we immediately know they are interested in football. So, we use geo referencing to send targeted push notifications, or a particular offer that we know will capture their attention. Another example of using location insights for ad targeting is a campaign for electric cars. In the beginning, all the car brands focused on selling electric cars in the big cities because they were the early adopters. However, now they have found out that people in the city are no longer interested in electric cars because there are not enough charging stations. Their ad campaigns now target people in the suburbs instead.
Growing influence
We usually obtain data from third parties because location data is very sensitive, and in Europe, there are very specific data protection laws. For us, it’s more about analyzing data and less about collecting. This is what our in-house data analysts, along with our strategic department and consultants, are doing to come up with new ideas and approaches. I believe, in combination with other data, location data will have a greater influence in the coming years.
