Advertising has undergone a notable evolution in recent years, from the impact that companies achieved through conventional television or on billboards in the middle of the street, to the current online advertisement, which focuses more and more directly on the user according to his browsing history.
This last approach improves the return on investment, since it reaches its target audience in an almost selected way, but it highlights the lack of user privacy, since in most cases it comes from third-party cookies, which they will soon be eliminated from the digital equation.
“Instead of focusing only on the digital environment of web pages and the information that can be extracted from there, why not look beyond, for example, to the geographical environment?”, explains Macarena Estévez, a famous mathematician, member of the Circle of Analytical Engineering and Advisor of several Big Data companies. In this way, he refers to the term ‘geoaudiences’ to describe the new horizon to which advertising is directed.
The concept ‘geoaudience’ refers to an anonymous audience, contextualized to geographic data and with consent to be impacted for their own benefit based on their geographic location. “Companies in the sector have already found their alternative for responsible advertising,” adds this mathematician.
Estévez, who collaborates with Appcelerate, a Spanish company specializing in technology applied to advertising, gives the example of the applications that users use to order a taxi and in which location is shared to achieve the best possible service. In this regard, it considers as “optimal” the possibility of receiving interesting offers just at the precise moment in which the user is in their usual shopping store.
The disappearance of third-party cookies
The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which raised a series of alarms both on the side of individuals and companies, after confirming the misuse of data from 2.7 million Europeans, forced governments to adapt and pass laws that support the digital consumer.
One of those laws is the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union of 2018, which establishes that companies need the explicit consent of users to be able to collect information and that it can be used in advertising campaigns.
In addition, the Organic Law on Data Protection in Europe, also in force since 2018, establishes that third-party cookies do not comply with the regulations and directly threaten the privacy of the user. The term ‘cookieless’ was born precisely to refer to the disappearance of third-party cookies.
Since then, companies have been concerned with what this could mean for them. Not only from the point of view of technological investment made to have the systems ready, but, above all, thinking that this would mean the return of intrusive advertising. In this context, the new approach to geo-audiences, where user data is completely anonymous, becomes relevant.
“Different sources of geo information provide sociodemographic data, points of interest, mobility, traffic, consumption, and many more. By combining all these sources, we can know which groups of people are in which places and when,” continues Macarena Estévez.
This is the work carried out by the Spanish programmatic advertising company APPcelerate, whose technology operates with more than 700 sociodemographic variables and more than two million Multisectoral Points of Interest (POIS) to interrelate them and create consumer profiles, in order to reach the digital advertising that best adjusts to that real behavior.
Source: dpa
(Reference image source: Austin Distel, Unsplash)
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