See That Billboard? It May See You, Too
I work peripherally in this industry, so I can provide more context to the data used here; based on the press release[i], Clear Channel is using three different types of data for this:<p>1) AT&amp;T cell tower data. All major US carriers collect aggregate movement data, and some have productized it (check out Grandata and Streetlight Data if you&#x27;re interested). They&#x27;re likely providing something like a persons count by daypart to Clear Channel at some geography, likely census block group. AT&amp;T likely provides course demographics as well (either by purchasing them from a data broker like Experian or Epsilon) or by looking up the aggregate demo characteristics reported by the US Census for the block group of the subscribers household. As an aside, current gen (4G) cell tower data isn&#x27;t very precise - maybe 100m accuracy or worse.<p>2) Placed opt in GPS panel data. There are many market research companies that pay consumer run location tracking apps (mFour and Instantly are other examples). Placed is probably the biggest (~1mm panelists).<p>3) PlaceIQ mobile ad server GPS data. PlaceIQ, xAd, Factual, Verve, Ninth Decimal...all of these companies read the lat &#x2F; long coordinates provided by mobile SSPs in mobile RTB bid stream to create location segment profiles associated with your phone&#x27;s Ad ID. The data isn&#x27;t very accurate (mobile ad fraud is a problem...an app change the GPS coord from rural Kansas to downtown Manhattan to juice their CPM in an auction; also, most of the GPS used for buying mobile inventory is via &quot;LastKnownLocation&quot; apis which are notoriously inaccurate). These guys generally use their data to group your Ad ID into a segment (if they see you at a Wendy&#x27;s, they&#x27;ll sell your Ad ID to mobile RTB bidders as a &quot;Frequent Wendy&#x27;s eater&quot;). Clear Channel is probably using this to see if exposure to a billboard caused you to make a purchase that they can attribute to your Ad ID (say via the advertisers CRM database), or to augment the demo data from AT&amp;T with demo segments they can buy from mobile data exchanges.<p>[i]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businesswire.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;home&#x2F;20160229005959&#x2F;en&#x2F;Clear-Channel-Outdoor-Americas-Launches-‘RADAR’-–" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businesswire.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;home&#x2F;20160229005959&#x2F;en&#x2F;Clea...</a>