GIS in marketing
Our news round-up gives details of some of the new products to be launched at GIS.
AP3 Imaging Services is launching two modules for its Alliance software, which integrates, processes and manages mapping data within a single software product.
TYDAC will demonstrate its new desktop geographic analysis package, SPANS Explorer, to the public for the first time.
CACI is launching an addition to its InSite mapping system. InSite Profiler will automatically apply Acorn codes to data (cutting out the need for manual input) to provide information about the personal and area profiles of customer bases. This can then be analysed and combined with other data as required.
Bartholomew – map data supplier to the GIS market – is launching Bartholomew GB Maps on CD-Rom. The product is designed to give desktop GIS users an affordable base data set for Britain.
Earth Resource Mapping will be showing Version 5 of its ER Mapper image processing and mapping software. This version is understood to incorporate a number new features.
DOCB:
SRCE: Marketing Week
PDAT: 190595
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SCTN: GIS in marketing
PGNO: 41
HDLN: CHART SURVEYORS
SBHD: There is huge ignorance about geodemographics. But, as David Reed reports, now that there is such a wide range of geographical information systems available, companies are beginning to recognise their targeting potential
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Geographical information systems are not usually the stuff of headlines – the complexities of analysing data within spatial co-ordinates do not make for punchy copy. It was to everybody’s surprise, then, that Oscar II, the Outdoor Advertising Association’s planned GIS for the poster market, should have been the subject of a flurry of news stories in March.
At issue was whether the geodemographic data held in Oscar II would be used by media planners and buyers to unpick contractors’ packages. While both sides now say the problem has been resolved (not least because the contractors have seen the opportunity to improve their packages by using the GIS), it gives some indication of the power such systems offer that one could have stirred up this level of controversy.
The full impact of using GIS as an analysis and targeting tool is only now being recognised by marketers. This acceptance has been held back by a series of misunderstandings about the systems, similar to the dispute which affected outdoor advertising.
At first, GIS was considered massively over-specified for marketers’ needs. This was a fair enough concern, given that their primary market to date has been for planning the distribution of utilities, healthcare and emergency services.
Then there were problems in getting the right data sets and relating them to physical geography. The realisation that postcodes – already the cornerstone of targeted marketing – could serve as spatial co-ordinates which can be readily mapped has helped to push this barrier aside.
Some of the most user-friendly and workable applications yet have been launched this year. From variants on CACI’s InSite, to the geolifestyle plotting of MIC and a simple location finder from QAS, there has never been a wider spectrum of systems to choose from.
Martin Daniels, project director of Oscar II for the OAA, says that concerns about data sets added to the system’s teething problems: “There is a huge ignorance about geodemographics. There is also an allergy, because people have been trying to flog Acorn or Mosaic types as classifications, when the media world just wants ABC1 21 to 44-year- old men who drink lager.
“Never mind about the clever descriptions, tell us in common media terms what the demographics are in these catchment areas,” he adds.
Having claimed to have “stripped away” the aggregated clusters from the core data, Daniels believes Oscar II will be up and running in early summer. The operating system and software have been specified, all that is needed is the completion of a pilot test being carried out on how poster visibility should be weighted within Oscar II. NOP is conducting surveys to assess the visibility rating of, for example, an illuminated six-sheet compared to a 46-sheet.
When complete, the system will allow media planners to combine the data from location traffic surveys, which show the split between local and non-local audiences for each posting, with demographic information on each area.
“If Maiden says it wants sites that reach AB business people, the geodemographics might help them to locate their geographic distribution,” says Daniels. “They can then rank their poster sites by an index of reach. If you want to run a poster campaign with an above average reach of those business people, you would take sites from the top quarter.”
Retailers and fmcg manufacturers have had the longest experience of marketing with GIS, mostly because suppliers have constructed systems designed for their needs. Those companies are now extending their systems to make them relevant to broader applications within those markets. CACI has unveiled three new modules within its InSite GIS that address specific needs.
InSiteMedia combines the distribution of local newspapers and the reach of local radio with spatial co-ordinates to turn GIS into a media planning tool. “It’s for retailers who want the accuracy of media planning, if not the cost,” says John Rae, director of PC products at CACI. “If you want to advertise around an outlet with a catchment of 30 minutes drive-time, you can look at newspaper circulation within that area and see where the overlap is. You get a measure of how much coverage and how much wastage a media schedule offers.”
A second module allows for what the financial industry calls “orphan handling”. Rae points out that insurance companies, in particular, have thousands of customers who are not covered by a particular salesperson – these are called orphans. By looking at their geographical dispersal, decisions can be made about which manager to assign them to. Adding in demographic data to ensure that a young male executive is not sent to visit an elderly female customer, for example, opens up huge cross-selling potential.
Retailers can also make sophisticated decisions about site location and promotional support by using InSiteRetail. It holds a dataset of the location of every retail outlet in the UK, mapped according to grid references down to the nearest metre.
“Working with Addresspoint maps, you can see where your shops are and what other retailers are around you. That allows you to do something you couldn’t do before,” says Rae.
A rival system has been launched by Goad Shopping Centre Plans, which includes more detailed information on the retail units. The supplier, Charles Goad, has been publishing large-scale maps of over 1,150 shopping areas in the UK since 1966. By digitising these maps and combining them with other data sources, Goad is able to offer a GIS that includes a database of more than 325,000 retail and service outlets.
According to Nicholas Bullmore, Goad marketing manager, “the data has numerous applications within marketing, including identifying retail markets, assessing retail competition, locating poster sites and identifying potential advertisers for, say, local papers”. The database includes Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), trading activity and the floorspace “footprint” for each location. In addition, it can also pull out visuals of the trading fascia on the shop.
For many marketers, a key issue is how to give potential customers the right information on where their nearest retail outlet is. If a customer service line has been established, it is critical that queries about stockists be answered as quickly as possible, or that the best options be identified.
QAS has taken advantage of postcoding data to create a system called Where’s My Nearest?. “It allows you to take a number of locations, for example, an electrical retail chain, for which you’ve got the postcode. You can put a grid reference against those and then look against a caller’s postcode grid reference and work out the distance to their nearest store,” explains GIS manager Richard Mason.
Even if the caller does not know the postcode, the system can derive it from the add-
ress. An early adopter of the system Archers Tours, the direct sales coach holiday division of Cosmos. It runs the system in its sales centre to locate the nearest coach pick-up point to the holidaymaker’s home. (Although bus stops do not have a postcode, Mason says the postcode of the nearest house or business was used.) According to the holiday company, an important benefit has been to remove the need for operators to consult maps and have a knowledge of local geography.
Mason admits that the system is presently only able to link the two postcodes “as the crow flies”. This means that key geographic factors, such as rivers or motorways, are not accounted for in the choice of destination, although a range of options can be called up on-screen to give the caller a choice.
To make more precise calculations, GIS users need to incorporate Addresspoint data, which gives each property a unique grid reference that is accurate to within one metre. At its root is work done by the Royal Mail ahead of its introduction of barcoding to sort bulk mail. This requires the delivery point – each house – to be identified as well as the destination postcode, which covers an average of 15 households or a 100 metre area.
While consumer marketers have a wide range of systems to choose from, business marketers are more constrained. There is presently only one system available, through TDS, called BusinessMaps. It makes use of the industry standard mapping software, MapInfo, which has been adapted to enhance its reporting and to take account of the simpler range of data that is available on businesses.
Onto this has been loaded the summary data from TDS’s Business File database of 400,000 companies, its business profiling system, BusinessAccumin, postcode boundary data and road network maps. A typical application might be to identify sales territories according to the sales potential in each area. By examining the data sets at postcode sector level, decisions can be made about how many prospect companies to assign to each salesperson.
Simon Lawrence, a director at TDS, says the system helps to avoid calculating potential markets on the wrong basis. “The number of businesses in an area does not reflect the potential,” he says. “We have done projects for a drinks vending company that clearly showed this. It had based its sales territories around the number of businesses, with key towns at the centre of each. We showed them the potential was the opposite – in rural areas, companies bought more machines because it was not so easy for their workers just to go out and get a drink as it was for people in town centres.”
Those suppliers who have been supporting GIS use in retail and fmcg have, until now, done little to migrate the experience across to other sectors. Like CACI, the Marketing Information Consultancy (MIC) is planning to change this. Owned by the Calix group, the parent company of lifestyle survey specialists Computerised Marketing Technologies (CMY) and NDL International, it is taking advantage of a massive new data set to open up GIS opportunities.
By merging CMT’s National Shoppers’ Survey and NDL’s Lifestyle databases, it has access to information on 18 million individuals in 13 million households, and claims this will rise to 17 million households by the end of the year. Significantly, 85 per cent of this data will be under three years old.
MIC takes data from this source that has been aggregated up from each postcode and loads it into a powerful GIS application. “You can build target market groups based on individual characteristics that define heavy, medium or light purchase of a particular product,” says MIC’s managing consultant, Richard Bandell. “Then at postcode level, you can build a classification system that defines their propensity to buy, identifying the potential in any given area.”
The critical mass which lifestyle data has reached has given marketing GIS an important boost, since any targeting work that is done can then be translated into individual names and addresses. Bandell believes problems in converting strategic analyses into actionable data have contributed to the slow up-take of GIS in the past.
“Historically, the bottleneck has been data. That is no longer there,” he says. With its uncorking may come a greater adoption of GIS and an unlocking of the power which geography can have on marketing plans. For advertisers, that will almost certainly mean ever more effective media planning. For media owners, it may just increase the pressure to provide vehicles with maximum reach at minimum waste.
