Placecast Partners With Sprint’s Pinsight Media to Launch the First Independent Location Verification Product for Advertisers

By Sudipto Ghosh On Aug 6, 2017

New Location Verification Solution From Placecast Leverages Carrier Data To Verify The Accuracy Of Mobile Marketing Efforts For Advertisers And Media Buyers, Eliminating Wasteful Spend

Placecast, a leading location-based mobile data management platform, has announced the launch of Location Verification. The new solution is an independent ad verification product that validates location accuracy of geo-targeted mobile ad campaigns. The Location Verification product has already been deployed by media technology companies like MediaIQ.

With Placecast’s suite of products, advertisers can create custom audience segments and target customers with location-enabled mobile ad campaigns on Placecast’s demand-side platform (DSP) or evaluate the accuracy of campaigns and their impact on customer behavior.

Placecast’s Location Accuracy Solution Would Optimize Ad Dollar Spending

Location Verification from Placecast is the only product in the market using highly accurate carrier data from Pinsight Media, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sprint, to confirm the location accuracy of mobile ads. This solution will help reduce mobile ad dollar wastage and ensure that target audiences are reached more effectively.

Location Verification debuts at a crucial time in the industry as an estimated $16 billion will be spent on targeted mobile ads in the US this year. 96 percent of marketers consider location data to be important, but 40% expressed concern around the quality of location data. Rightfully so, as initial Location Verification results show at least 25% of media spend is wasted, and in many cases much more. Of the $16 billion spent this year on targeted mobile ads, approximately $4 billion is squandered.

‘Truth Set’ of Location Data Empowers Mobile Advertisers to Confidently Geo-Target Audience

Kevin McGinnis, CEO of Pinsight Media, said, “It’s staggering to see how many millions of dollars are wasted every year based on old or inaccurate data. We are proud to support solutions like Location Verification that help raise the bar in the mobile advertising industry.”

Traditionally, location-based ad vendors do not have this kind of “truth set,” or deterministic data, to which they can compare and verify location data. Instead, they rely solely on pattern recognition — probabilistic modeling — such as eliminating latitude and longitude coordinates with too few decimal places to be precise, or looking for devices that appear so often that they can be assumed fraudulent.

Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast, said “Since inception, we’ve been laser-focused on solving the complexities around location data, which is why we’re pleased to offer Location Verification, the first and only product set to tackle inaccuracy in the location space. Carrier data is a canonical truth data set that enables us to understand and score the accuracy of data in the mobile ad ecosystem to an unprecedented level. With the power of carrier data to verify accuracy, mobile advertisers can feel confident that they’re optimizing their ad spend toward reaching their appropriate geo-targeted audience.”

Partnership with Pinsight Media Takes Location Data Verification Beyond Pattern Recognition

The Placecast Location Verification product is unique in that it uses a truth set of location data — the holy grail of deterministic data — from Pinsight Media to test the accuracy of location, offering a level of accuracy that cannot be provided by pattern recognition alone. Placecast’s tests suggest truth set data uncovers at least twice as much inaccurate location data compared to pattern recognition.

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Geo-Targeting Reduce Media Fraud, Delivering Optimized Campaigns

Advertisers implement a standard tag into their location-aware mobile ad campaigns. Placecast then analyzes the tag data to validate user location at the time an ad was served. The advertiser receives reporting with percentages of daily impressions that met or did not meet the advertiser’s geo-targeting parameters. As a result, media fraud is reduced and advertisers benefit from optimizing their campaign, selecting vendors that best deliver on campaign goals.

John Goulding, Head of Product for MediaiQ, said, “By integrating Placecast’s verification capability into our AiQ analytics platform, we’re able to offer advertisers a level of confidence in location-based advertising which hasn’t been previously available. Furthermore, with verified location insights we’re one step closer to providing an accurate and comprehensive view of the entire customer journey–both online and offline.”

Location Verification Uses Anonymized and Aggregated Location Data

Rather than building data profiles or targeting specific customers, Location Verification simply uses anonymized and aggregated location data from carriers to verify whether the media being bought is accurate or not. Essentially, Pinsight Media’s data is used as a “yes or no” check for location. No personally identifiable information is used or exposed.