TechBytes with Julien Escande, Commercial Director at Quadrant.io

Hi Julien, tell us about your role and journey into Technology.

I am the Commercial Director at Quadrant, a Singapore-based company that meets demand for authenticated, high-quality, mobile location-based data through technology. I manage the commercial aspects at Quadrant including driving data solutions for businesses who use location data to build new products and services.

Prior to joining Quadrant, I worked for LiveRamp, a leading AdTech platform offering identity resolution services. I was the first Senior Sales Manager for LiveRamp in the United Kingdom and led the company’s global expansion, eventually moving to Singapore to lead Business Development in APAC.

What kind of team and technology do you handle at Quadrant.io?

I work closely with the Technology development team, Marketing department and Sales teams to develop and expand Quadrant’s mobile location data solutions around the globe. Working across multi-functional teams continuously ensures that our data feeds are fit for purpose for our customers’ key needs and challenges.

Quadrant provides refined, high quality, tailored mobile location data feeds which are built for purpose for clients who want to use the data for analytics, attribution, mapping and/or programmatic purposes.

For instance, Quadrant’s mobile location data is able to bridge the physical-digital worlds and allows marketers to understand movement patterns and develop insights which enables them to communicate to their target audiences.

Which set of industries and titles would you be targeting to grow your audience base?

We see more demand from platforms and large agencies to access our data feeds in order to bring more data in house. Platforms are becoming much smarter and more automated and they are able to serve, measure and optimize campaigns in near real time. In order to do this, they need real-time streams of location data as people move and interact with the world – which is what Quadrant are able to provide. Furthermore, our location data is being used to enhance their own internal data sets which they use to provide a 360-degree view of their clients both offline and online.

We are also seeing demand come from a wider range of industries who use our location data for a number of reasons including geo-spatial analysis, mapping/movement analysis, financial (such as Hedge Funds), real estate and others.

We have one of the largest data sets in the world with location data that is global, so if an agency wanted data feeds to understand movement patterns or user behavior in a particular country there is a good chance we could provide it.

The EU has GDPR; CCPA recently came into effect in the US. What kind of effect will this have on the industry in your opinion?

I think that when it comes to regulations, it is important that we avoid stifling innovation and growth and ensure that user privacy and safety is protected yet businesses are still able to use data to create solutions that benefit us.

Regulations should protect ordinary citizens, for example they should prevent insurance firms from using past data to turn down insurance claims or stopping healthcare companies from restricting treatments. Yet, they should not be so onerous that only the biggest and richest data companies can afford to comply, this would simply lead to data being housed by a few monopolistic companies while smaller, innovative firms would lose out.

AI is a big attraction for the data companies in the US and EU. What kind of AI applications will emerge in your industry and what sort of benefits would they bring?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have a significant impact on the Advertising industry. For instance, AI and Machine Learning algorithms can be used to build new products by predicting users’ behavioral patterns based on past data.

AI can also be used to remove bad and fraudulent data from the ecosystem. As bad data typically exhibits certain patterns, AI would be able to quickly and continuously identify and remove this data and ensure that only the best and most accurate data is being used for products and services in our industry.