Opera Mediaworks, the global mobile advertising and marketing platform, tells MMW that they’ve inked a new partnership with Unacast to provide beacon and proximity data for retargeting at scale to the world’s top advertisers for the first time.
Until now, the Opera team says, the advertising industry has relied heavily on GPS data, which is only available when users are outdoors and actively using their mobile devices. Beacon data is far more accurate than GPS, registering consumer behavior down to a precise aisle, shelf or product.
Clients of Opera Mediaworks, which include 90% of Ad Age’s top advertisers, now have access to a customer’s “real-world identity” as created by Unacast, the world’s largest aggregator of offline consumer behavioral data gathered from beacons. This will allow advertisers to increase the personalization, timeliness and effectiveness of their mobile marketing campaigns.
Retailers and brands that have already deployed beacons will be able to leverage their beacon data and retarget their own customers across the Opera Mediaworks platform, to encourage them to return to their brick-and-mortar or online stores. Companies holding various types of proximity data can also monetize their data by allowing advertisers and brands to license anonymous data.
“The real value of beacon data is in its accuracy and granularity. Until now, that has simply meant targeting a shopper in the moment, as they walk down the aisle about a nearby product on sale,” explains Andrew Dubatowka, Director of Product Strategy at Opera Mediaworks. “With this partnership, marketers can extend the life of that beacon data beyond the confines of the store and, with a detailed understanding of a shopper’s interests, apply it in other contexts, such as audience targeting and even ROAS (return on ad spend) measurement.”
