Semcasting to Use Digital Element’s Hyperlocal Geolocation Technology to Non-invasively Target Digital Neighborhoods, Increase Qualified Audience Coverage Three-fold
ATLANTA – (September 12, 2011) – With the back-to-school shopping season ending, retailers are now turning their attention to the all-important holiday season. This year, however, retailers will have a new privacy-sensitive online marketing tool at their disposal to target consumers where it matters most—within their “digital neighborhoods.”Digital Element, the leading provider of geolocation and IP Intelligence technology, today announced that it has partnered with Semcasting to provide its IP-to-ZIP code targeting technology for the company’s IP Audience Zone Targeting solution, which automatically scores and categorizes online traffic into user types and demographic segments to secure full qualified audience coverage, beyond the estimated 35 percent targeted by cookies.
“With ‘Do Not Track’ programs for online behavioral targeting emerging and shoppers unwilling to disclose personal information for a more personalized online experience, it has become more difficult for retailers to accurately target the right web users in the right places,” said Ray Kingman, CEO, Semcasting. “Instead of relying on an increasingly limited base of cookied users, IP Audience Zone Targeting allows retailers to personalize the website experience using an advanced, privacy-sensitive, and demographically appropriate targeting process. Our solution classifies—in real time—anonymous web visitors in order to automatically provide personalized content and targeted promotions specific to digital neighborhoods across America, based on user type and demographic profiles.”
IP Audience Zone’s multi-step analytical process incorporates Digital Element’s NetAcuity Edge™ technology to identify web users’ location down to a ZIP code level. The solution then segments the ZIP codes by audience types and assigns the demographics associated with them as sub-ZIP code micro areas for digital targeting. IP Audience Zone relies on the premiere direct marketing database which contains detailed information on more than 227 million individuals and 126 million households, mapping it to the U.S. Internet by IP address.
This solution helps retailers enhance reach and frequency and enrich the analytics of digital campaigns by targeting site visitors based on the same demographic and psychographic data used in other advertising mediums. For example, large electronics retailers could detect the user type (home with demographics and psychographics, business, government, education, wireless, etc.) associated with an anonymous website visitor and decide to reroute to a specific landing page and/or serve an appropriate targeted promotion for products that resonate with certain audience segments.
“Companies such as Semcasting realize the value our technology brings to the targeting arena, in terms of both data accuracy and privacy,” said Rob Friedman, executive vice president, Digital Element. “We believe that having the ability to identify the location of website visitors down to a ZIP code level forms the foundation of understanding what motivates and interests consumers in their local communities. Our partnership with Semcasting creates another avenue to help retailers drive sales not only during the busy holiday season, but also throughout the year.”
In 2011, retail ecommerce is expected to grow 13.7 percent to sales of $188 billion.1 The holiday shopping season, which traditionally starts the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, can make up as much as 40 percent of a retailer’s annual revenue.2
About Digital Element
Digital Element delivers the de facto standard in IP Intelligence, providing coverage for 99.9999 percent of the Internet and collecting more than one million points-of-view daily from different online vantage points. Most of the world’s largest networks, websites, video portals and social platforms deploy Digital Element’s IP Intelligence technology to target advertising, localize content and stream video, manage geographic rights, and enhance analytics. As the industry pioneer, Digital Element has long been the technical leader in evolving non-invasive IP Intelligence technology and now offers many IP factors including Country/Region/City/Postcode Geography, Connection Speed, Domain Name, ISP, Company Name, Industry, Home/Business, Language, and Proxy information.
For more information on how to uncover new levels of insight about online users, please visit www.digitalelement.com. Digital Element is a business unit of Digital Envoy.
About Semcasting
Semcasting is a supplier of predictive data solutions that help direct marketers and agencies better target online and offline customers, discover new market opportunities, manage risk, and detect fraud. The company’s patented software platform uses existing data to create predictive models that are applied to over 227 million individuals and 126 million households, making more accurate projections about future customer behavior. Semcasting licenses its proprietary data to some of the largest data compilers in the industry and supports over 800 campaigns a year in the financial, telecommunications, non-profit, franchise and retail industries. For more information, visitwww.semcasting.com.
1 Grau, Jeffery, “U.S. Retail Ecommerce Forecast: Growth Opportunities in a Maturing Channel,” eMarketer, April 2011.
2 National Retail Federation, “Holiday FAQ.”