Marketron announces location-based advertising solution

marketron logoBusiness software company Marketron today announced the addition of location-based advertising to its suite of monetization products. Martin Kristiseter, VP of Mobile Solutions, promised that the new product “will be unequaled in its ability to present and deliver cutting-edge mobile advertising products.”

Location-based advertising addresses the dominant trend in digital listening, which is the migration of consumers to mobile environments. An eMarketer study this month concluded that mobile advertising will surpass traditional radio advertising revenue this year, and continue to widen the lead. Marketron’s new initiative is aimed at providing new value to local advertisers (car dealers being the preeminent example) and broadcasters who sell advertising to them.

Marketron claims a nationwide inventory of location-verified ad opportunities, offering quick launch of geo-specific campaigns at scale. In a phone conversation with Martin Kristiseter, we asked what location-verified really means, and how Marketron targets consumers based on where they are right now.

“We tap into thousands of publishers who are sharing ‘true GPS’ data. Not IP addresses or registration sdata. Pandora uses registration data. their targeting is really far off, because they’re serving me ads for my registration location, even though I’ve been living somewhere else for five years.”

Counter-intuitively, those publishers are not radio station websites. “We’re not tapping into radio station apps at all, because we need the scale.”

Kristiseter explained that Marketron’s technology tracks ad impressions from giant web publishers like AccuWeather and Huffington Post via trading desks where programmatic ad-buying takes place.

“Huffington Post shares the data in an ad call when someone hits their page. Within the ad call is included GPS data. Those impressions generate five times the money as ads that don’t include GPS data. We don’t connect directly to Huffington Post, we connect to the trading desks. We built a campaign management platform and the algorithms that make this happen. We’re bidding on available impressions that include the GPS location. At the end of the day we don’t really care where that information is coming from, we just care that it’s location-verified.”

The result is a data universe of constantly shifting real-time locations, always in flux. “It’s very fluid and all tied to real-time bidding,” Kristiseter told RAIN.

That scope of service is noted by launch evangelist Beasley Broadcast Group. Heather Monahan, EVP of Sales for Beasley, said that with Marketron’s new platform, “We are able to offer our clients a high-quality mobile customer acquisition tool at scale.”

 

Brad Hill