Today’s podcast guest is Ran Ben-Yair, President and CEO of the location intelligence company Ubimo. Ran discusses how to use data to target out of home audiences, mistakes out of home companies make when using data and whether google will enter out of home buying.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:20 — 22.6MB)

Here are the highlights.

Talk about Ubimo’s history 

Ubimo is a location intelligence company.  We founded the company 7 years ago with the intention of trying to leverage how we can leverage location data and mobile data and turn it into insight about consumer behavior…there was this whole frenzy to replicate this the digital ecosystem from desktop to mobile but it was really focused on the online experience.  We felt that this was the first time in history that you have everybody walking around with a device that is sending location signals.  And for us it was really interesting to see how we can use the signal…and connect it with your digital experience to try to gain more insight about consumer behavior.

How big is Ubimo

The company was founded in Tel Aviv in Israel and today we are close to 55 people, 15 here in New York where are business center is at and then we have an R&D center in Israel.  The company was backed by Pitango which is Israel’s largest VC and we’ve had two funding rounds…

Ubimo “helps out of home businesses sell audiences instead of property location by connecting the digital and physical world.”

If you think about how out of home has been sold previously it was mostly how many eyeballs am I reaching.  Maybe there was some metadata about the nature of the neighborhood…We’re looking at an audience, let’s say an audience with a propensity to buy product X…we take that audience and we overlay it with the real world.  We test how it indexes against various locations including billboards or it can be stores.  And then we figure out which are the most relevant locations for that specific audience.  The minute you do that you turn the conversation from an offline impressions approach to an online digital approach.  You’re starting to talk the same language that a CMO will talk.

What mistakes do out of home companies make when they apply data to out of home?

There are two main mistakes…One is a lot of companies…looking at static data which is tied to a location which is not necessarily tied to movement data.  So devices that are passing through that area will tell a very different story…

The other is…sometimes missing the opportunity to go granular and use custom data sets…or bringing in your own first party data…that’s the cutting edge…

Will Google enter automated out of home buying?

It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when..I think it’s just a matter of scale.  Once we get there we will see the big guys playing there.

[wpforms id=”9787″]

Paid Advertisement