The Problem: How to build digital advertising audiences based on contextual intelligence
It’s one thing to know where in the world (geographically-speaking) a mobile ping comes from. It’s another thing to be able to uncover the context or, rather, the real world environment surrounding that ping. Is it coming from a restaurant? A gym? A corporate office park? And then taking it one step further, where are those anonymized mobile pings traveling to and from?
Unfortunately, most location-based data sources available today—including open source data—simply don’t cut it. While they can provide the exact latitude and longitude, time stamps, device types, and device IDs associated with almost any mobile ping, they can’t tell the full story about where those pings really came from. That doesn’t really help advertisers at all.
So, the RainBarrel team tasked itself with developing a cutting-edge way to build digital advertising audiences at scale. They already had their own source for mobile pings but lacked the necessary context around those mobile pings to unlock new value for their customers. They just needed access to high-quality and accurate geospatial data to fill in those contextual gaps.
Making matters worse, as a Canada-based startup squarely focused on addressing the targeting needs of advertisers servicing Canadian consumers, the pickings were slim. “When it comes to data, Canada is an underserved market,” explained David Choi, RainBarrel’s Product Manager. “Most data providers are based in the U.S. and tend to treat Canada like an afterthought.”
While getting access to the right data was one hurdle to overcome, it was equally important for that data to be sourced in an ethical way. “For us, it’s an absolute priority to not only be privacy-compliant when building digital advertising audiences but also to be clear about how we put those audiences together,” underscored Travis Riedlhuber, RainBarrel’s Managing Director. “Transparency is the key to building high-quality digital advertising audiences at scale.”
The Problem-Solver: RainBarrel
RainBarrel is a proprietary Audience Graph based on commercially available geospatial data, allowing advertisers to target their messages to the right audience. As opposed to most other audience targeting methods available in the market today—typically defined by online user behaviors—RainBarrel takes precision targeting to an entirely new level by leveraging the power of location-based data to build digital advertising audiences rooted in offline user behaviors.
Say you run a luxury brand and wanted to target consumers interested in purchasing high-end goods. In the past, you might have built a digital advertising audience around users who regularly visited the websites of brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. Those online behaviors would lead advertisers to believe that those consumers make up the “luxury buyer” segment.
Unfortunately, these online behaviors are often aspirational at best; just because consumers visit a luxury brand’s website doesn’t necessarily mean they can or will make a high price point purchase. However, a consumer who regularly steps foot at least twice per month into a Nordstrom store is more likely to be an active shopper—based on offline behaviors alone—and, therefore, more valuable to a brand from a targeting standpoint. This is precisely how RainBarrel expertly uses geospatial data to close the gap between aspiration and intent.
In other words, they’ve unlocked the untapped potential at the convergence of digital audience segmentation and real-world actions to create a more effective way for advertisers to target, reach, engage, and convert audiences. And they’ve built this around three guiding principles:
- Privacy: All data used to build digital advertising audiences must meet the most stringent privacy standards and be in compliance with current GDPR and CCPA regulations. No personally-identifiable information is ever captured or shared whatsoever.
- Transparency: All information pertaining to the company’s 2,600+ audiences is made publicly available, including details around data recency, audience size, number of POIs, geographic distribution, methodology, documentation, and the list goes on.
- Reach: All audiences are built, first and foremost, to address the evolving needs of RainBarrel’s customers in real-time. This also means making the audiences easy to activate and compatible with today’s leading DSPs and digital advertising platforms.