InformationWeek
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April 2, 2001 |
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A Little ZIP Goes A Long Way In Targeted Marketing
Marketers combine demographic and behavior software to target customers in a region
By Eileen Colkin (ecolkin@cmp.com)
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hen businesses want to sell products and services to Web surfers, it helps to know where they live and how to get in touch with them. Two software vendors say they have a way to identify the ZIP code of a potential customer by combining and analyzing geographical marketing data and Internet marketing data.
Plurimus Corp. and MapInfo Corp. last week said they've integrated MapInfo's TargetPro demographic and segmentation software, which offers geographic demographic information to the offline world, with Plurimus' Internet Summary Data software, which tracks and analyzes customers' online movement based on data collected from a pool of 3.5 million Internet users.
The combination of the two vendors' products provides the ability to match online behavior with locations and create marketing and sales programs tailored for specific ZIP codes.
Plurimus doesn't use the typical cookie-on-browser tracking methods that analyze usage data. Instead, the company has agreements with Internet service providers whose customers are statistically representative of the overall population of a region. The ISPs feed it with live data collected as their 3.5 million customers prowl the Internet.
"There are very few companies that can pull data off the pipes rather than use a browser," says Guy Creese, a senior analyst in the decision support research unit at the Aberdeen Group. "That gives them a leg up over other companies that can't say if their data is representative of the population."
Plurimus says it has won approval from multiple privacy organizations by attaching no personal information other than a ZIP code to Web surfing data. The usage data is washed of all personally identifiable information, the vendor says, and then is given a Plurimus ID using third-party geo-coding. The data is sent to a data warehouse to be analyzed and the results sold. The process is audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers twice a year.
Internet Summary Data is $10,000 for a single-user desktop for national coverage.
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