NEW YORK – Dstillery, the leading applied data science company serving the marketing & advertising industry, today announced that it has been awarded a patent for “evaluating authenticity of geographic data associated with media requests.” The patent recognizes Dstillery’s exclusive ability to filter out inaccurate location data from mobile devices, ensuring that only high-accuracy location data is used in Dstillery’s audience building, actionable insights, and geospatial analysis tool, Audience Studio.
The availability of location data derived from mobile devices has expanded marketers’ understanding of consumer behavior, while mobile advertising itself has reshaped the entire marketing landscape. Mobile ad inventory is more valuable when it comes with an attached location, incentivizing app developers to include lat/long data whenever possible. As a result, lat/long coordinates are often included with media even when accurate data is unavailable. Using this bad location data provides little value, resulting in imprecise targeting and erroneous insights for the advertiser.
“The problem of detecting which location data points are trustworthy and which are sloppy–or just plain fake–is inherently difficult. A lat/long comes in, and it does indeed correspond to a real point on a map, so how can you tell if it’s the actual location of the user?” said Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist at Dstillery. “Advertisers themselves are at least one step away from the actual data, and have no way of knowing if the data they’re using for insights, targeting or attribution is authentic. If they base their campaign decisions on faulty insights, or target with sloppy data, then their success rates are much lower. The technology behind this patent allows Dstillery to understand which location signals are accurate and valuable, and then use that high quality location data to help marketers make smart media decisions. At the same time, it creates a way to evaluate the data providers themselves, a unique assessment that the market is currently lacking.”
Dstillery’s patented technology uses two methods to determine which location data points are valid. The first involves examining the distribution of the data, and identifying patterns that don’t make sense, such as too many devices found at a specific lat/long point.
The second takes advantage of Dstillery’s unparalleled view into observed web and app behavior to validate location data. If Dstillery receives a data signal showing a consumer at a car dealership, it can cross reference that signal against the anonymized consumer’s online behavior and determine if that consumer also researched cars lately. Correlations identified between location and online activity are a measure of the quality of the location data, and give Dstillery a way to evaluate the trustworthiness of the data source as a whole.
Once the valid location data points are identified, Dstillery uses the data to create location-based audiences, identifying customers who have previously been to a particular brick and mortar location or are predicted to visit one in the future. Advertisers can use this data to target messages to those audiences, as well as layer on other location, web, and app behaviors to generate insights that help better understand these users. Location visits can also be used to better understand users from a web-based audience, providing insights into their real-world habits and helping marketers better understand that audience’s activities and motivations.
About Dstillery
Dstillery is the leading predictive marketing intelligence company, helping Fortune 500 companies and brands drive revenue growth by providing an omniscient, actionable view of consumer behavior.
Led by the industry’s most awarded team of data scientists and engineers since 2008, Dstillery has earned distinction for brand safety, machine learning innovation and high performance media activation. It is the only company that delivers fresh, behaviorally derived consumer insights to directly impact the full spectrum of marketing research and media business objectives. That’s why marquee brands in industries such as Retail, CPG, Finance, Luxury, B2B, Telco, Travel, and Tech use our full suite of insights, data and activation solutions to create more meaningful consumer touch points across multiple channels.
To learn more, visit us at www.dstillery.com or @Dstillery.
