Next Generation Geo Marketing

Dimitri — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:00:06 +0000

A friend just sent me this beautiful visualization of where people are taking pictures in London. You can clearly see the high traffic areas around the tourist hotspots. It’s a great use of the type of data people are generating by going about their everyday lives. It also shows how this data could become really practical for marketers trying to find out who is where at what moment in time. I am sure the picture would change if we were to look at certain times of day, days of week, seasons or even profiles of the people that are taking pictures. The view would be very different for people who live in London vs those who don’t for example.

This type of location based behavioral data could give marketers very valuable information about when they need to be where in order to surround their target audience. It seems this data would be able to provide much more detailed information than what is currently available. While this particular application only looks at where people are taking photographs, other location based services like Foursquare generate tons of data about what people are doing where. Foursquare already automatically shows their users which locations are trending (ie becoming popular) real time.

The application of location based behavioral data will go well beyond location based targeting on mobile devices. I believe it will soon become the basis for the next generation of geo marketing tools. Retailers for example could use it to determine where to locate their stores and media planners could use it for planning their outdoor advertising. We could even use this new type of data to profile zip codes based on the activities of the people who live there. These zip code profiles could be used in the same way marketers are now using socio demographic profiles of zip codes for targeting. The current profiles are pretty static since they are based on more traditional sources like the Census. The behavioral location based profiles could be much more dynamic and a lot more detailed. A company like Foursquare, if it wanted to, could actually already very easily make these zip profiles available to marketing professionals. This would make them a real competitor to established 3^rd party data vendors like Acxiom and Experian.

Visualizing the Flu

Dimitri — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:00:40 +0000

The New York Times created an interactive map that shows where the outbreaks of the Swine Flue are located.

These types of epidemiological maps have been around for a while. In fact, they were the very first examples of geographic representations of data. Probably the most famous example is John Snow’s map of the 1854 Cholera outbreak in London.

Snow plotted the cholera cases on a map of Soho in London and he marked the water pumps with a cross. This showed that there was a high concentration of cholera cases around a water pump on Broad Street.

Click on the map to download high resolution maps

This evidence prompted the local authorities to investigate the pump. They found that it was contaminated and they replaced its handle. This is a great example of the power of data visualization. Finding the cause of the local epidemic could have been achieved through statistical analysis but here a visual representation of the data on a map was far more efficient.

John Snow was thanked for his contribution to the fight against cholera with a commemorative pump on the exact location of the old contaminated one. The pub on the corner was also named after him. John Snow however was a teetotaler – he only drank boiled water … .

The DoubleThink » london

Next Generation Geo Marketing

Visualizing the Flu