TechBytes with Jake Moskowitz, VP, Measurement Solutions, Placecast

Jake Moskowitz
VP, Measurement Solutions, Placecast

According to a recent insight from SAS, 2018 is set to present more opportunities for location intelligence platforms. Placecast, a leading location intelligence platform leverages deterministic carrier data to deliver a better audience, verification, and insight solutions. What does that mean for business operations, and how could marketers utilize location intelligence solutions to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. To understand the finer nuances of the integration between Placecast’s location intelligence solutions and traditional marketing technology tools, we chatted with Jake Moskowitz, VP, Measurement Solutions.

MTS:Tell us about your role at Placecast and the team you handle?
Jake Moskowitz: As the VP Measurement Solutions at Placecast, I lead all measurement initiatives at the company. Essentially, I design, launch, and run new solutions leveraging Placecast’s unique access to mobile carrier data to benefit all parts of the digital marketing ecosystem. Location Verification is the core of our measurement offering, using a truth set of carrier data from multiple major carriers to verify the accuracy of location data and location-targeted media.

MTS:How does Placecast’s content adapter framework enable easy data ingestion into Mobile DMP?
Jake Moskowitz: Our content adapter framework refers to the flexibility of our platform to adjust to a wide range of data formatting on ingestion. This is a critical element for our business on two counts. First, it allows us to provide DMP services to wireless carriers by dealing with whatever format the data is in without requiring the carriers to make adjustments on our behalf. In our experience, carrier data looks very different depending on the carrier, and we need to blend it all together into a consistent structure to support our use cases. Second, it allows us to offer Location Verification for all the prime use cases for location data, namely audience segmentation, real-time geo-fencing or geo-targeting, in-store visit attribution, and consumer insights.

MTS: How do you see Data Normalization and Matching Platforms evolving with the adoption of predictive intelligence within DMPs?
Jake Moskowitz: We believe sources of historic deterministic truth data can be used as a training data set to create a predictive algorithm. That’s exactly what we’ve done by using historical Location Verification deterministic data to create our Pre-Bid tool, which populates for clients in real time a percentage likelihood that a given location data point is accurate, so clients can make a decision for themselves which data points to trust and use. Given its name, the primary use case for Pre-Bid is for programmatic bidding, but we can build algorithms for any context so long as we have enough quality metadata associated with location data points in order to do so. Clients can use our tool to make sure only accurate location data is used to associate with a given consumer within a DMP environment, to maximize the efficiency of any insights made or actions taken for that consumer based on location data.

MTS: How can Location Verification improve the quality of data that lives within a DMP?
Jake Moskowitz: Location Verification is a data accuracy filter based on a truth set of data from carriers. Within a DMP environment, we can filter through raw location data points and eliminate the specific data points we know aren’t accurate. That’s true of first party data a DMP client stores in a DMP or third party data a DMP client might purchase to append to its user database. Our normative database shows a consistent pattern of 30-50% of data points being inaccurate across location data sources, including SDK-based data as well as data and audiences from even prominent vendors in the space. Using our filter can ensure even the least accurate data sources are useful because we can weed out the data points that aren’t accurate.

MTS: What are the major pain-points for advertisers and media publishers in optimizing location-based mobile marketing campaigns?
Jake Moskowitz: First and foremost, there is a deep underlying trust issue in the location space, that marketers and agencies don’t inherently believe in what they’re buying. According to a recent survey from AdAge and Factual, more than 80% of marketers are concerned about location data quality, and nearly 65% are concerned about data source transparency. We built Location Verification to bridge that gap, so buyers feel confident they’re getting what they pay for, and sellers are confident they’re doing what they say they’re doing. Only by bridging the trust gap can the location industry fulfill its enormous promise.

Secondly, marketers are faced with the challenge of optimizing to multiple objectives that sometimes are negatively correlated. For instance, today marketers sometimes need to include mobile web inventory if they want to achieve their scale goal at a minimum level of viewability. But mobile web inventory is notoriously inaccurate and imprecise when it comes to location data. Our feeling is, if location is important, then location accuracy should be the primary objective, because if someone is 1000 miles from the nearest store, who cares if the ad is viewable?

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Jake.
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