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To expand on that, say you want to market to only people within the ER room itself because you are an attorney for personal injury. You will most likely get ev
by sologoub 8y ago
To expand on that, say you want to market to only people within the ER room itself because you are an attorney for personal injury.
You will most likely get everyone who’s phone was within the overall geofence +100yards or so (sometimes better sometimes worse, really depends on what and how you are measuring).
That will include everyone above and below you with good enough signal to get through. Hospitals are usually tall in urban centers, so 5-10 stories of people?
Now you have your potential list. However, the real segment you just made are hospital visitors + employees/vendors.
Maybe you can exclude those that you see a lot or on a regular cycle as staff/vendors.
You are still not very close to just “personal injury” data.
Usually, you’ll need to combine this with something more to make better segment overall and go from there.
Unfortunately, data vendors will often market the above without much cleaning as “ER visitors” or “people with health problem X”.
There are numerous threads on HN about how bad some of these segments are - people tagged with mutually exclusive segments, wrong info, etc. That’s why FB and Google, and to a lesser extent for now Amazon, are sitting on some really valuable data - we tend to tell them explicitly and/or they have fine-grained location on us.
And let’s not forget that stuff like this has spurred responses like GDPR.
- bigiain 8y agoThe list doesn't need to be perfect - hell, it doesn't even need to be very good at all. It just needs to convert better than not using the list. (I'm equal parts horrified and impressed that someone's actually doing this... This is why, as much as it's annoying at work, I really like the GDPR...)
- sologoub 8y agoTrue, but then again Google/FB/etc offer better access to a more targetted audience at a reasonable price. I’d consider using something like this if I had already deployed marketing capital elsewhere and hit diminishing returns. These are more akin to gambling in my book. Not to say that polygon-based geofencing doesn’t work. It does, but with larger, less dense locations where the lower fidelity is good enough.
- bigiain 8y ago> True, but then again Google/FB/etc offer better access to a more targetted audience at a reasonable price. I'm not so sure in this specific case. If I were a (cue pejorative stereotype for emphasis) scumbag ambulance chasing lawyer - I doubt there's anything in Facebook or Google's ad targeting demographics that'd give me quite the same opportunities as a rough-and-ready demographic of "people at or close to hospital emergency departments" to try selling to... I hope (but am prepared to be shown otherwise) than neither Facebook nor Google have an easy way to target ads to people who've just posted "Faaark! Just been in a car accident! #YOLO #GladIBoughtAVolvo #ShouldntHaveBeenTexting" (Evil-idea: I wonder if anyone's using siome combinations of accelerometer and GPS data to detect potentially traumatic events and selling that data on?)
- BMFX 8y agoTie into insurance safe driver programs that in your car... Hell tie into the car its self soon... With all the car brand API's coming out. I know it could be done with Tesla, and Mercedes....