In this week’s episode of the #BeetCast we explore the topic through the initiatives of the Publicis Groupe and the Spark Foundry agency. Our guest is Jason Smith, President, Diversified Investments at Spark Foundry, a unit of Publicis Media.

Jason is twenty-year veteran of the agency world with time as Horizon and Mindshare.  He joined Spark Foundry earlier this year in a newly created role

In our chat, he speaks to the imperative of media investment around the increasingly diverse U.S. consumer population.  He says one of the barriers to investment is the under representation of diverse groups in panels and other audience planning measurement methodologies.

This is a very open and direct on the need and outlook of real change in the advertising business.

Great conversation.   Thank you Jason.

And thanks to our sponsor Mediaocean  for supporting this podcast.

And thank you for listening!

But, whilst few people are talking about it, the world of location advertising signals is also plagued with problems.

Beet.TV interviewed Jason Smith, chief business officer of Location Sciences, a company which runs verification on location data signals. Its just-published half-year report The State Of Location Advertising, analyzed 500 million digital location targeted impressions delivered in the UK and US from January-June 2019, and uncovered three worries:

1. “On a given day across the location based digital advertising campaign, 65% of the impressions and spend in that advertising effort can be categorised as waste or fraudulent.”
2. “As a result of privacy and we see things like iOS 13 (ITP) and the impending CCPA, we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in high-quality GPS signals, which represents where people are, where they exist and how they visit stores.”
3. “Across all of the suppliers in the marketplace within this report, we’re seeing a massive differentiation between high quality suppliers that have really good data, target very well and an extreme long tail (of poor-quality signals).”

Location Sciences’ Verify tool purports to ascertain the accuracy of GPS, carrier IP, WiFi and beacon signals. But Smith says the industry is even starting to see the rise of fraudulent location signals.

“We see many sellers and many platforms replacing high quality GPS with low quality IP,” Smith says. “It’s widely available. It doesn’t cost very much and it’s much easier to detect.

“As a result, we see marketers targeting people that may have visited a McDonald’s, they may have visited a Cadillac dealership, they may have visited a Buffalo Wild Wings and the advertisements are inaccurate because they’re targeting people where they live, not where they are.

“That happens because of maybe just poor management of the campaigns, lack of inquiry from the brands, but in some cases, GPS signals can actually be presented as fraudulent. They’re all self-reported throughout applications across each of the app stores.”

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.