Effective location-based advertising requires a detailed picture of the people in a place, and how they move and circulate within that space. Location analytics expert Intermx is using HERE location data to make that picture clear.

Recall the last time you visited a sports arena, or a shopping mall, or made your way through a crowded airport. How many signs did you pass by? What were the ads that you saw? What do you consider the value of those signs is to an advertiser?

In the arena of Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising, the value of signs like billboards and road-side advertisements are all given a rating based on who sees a sign, how long it’s is in their field of view, the time spent in proximity to that sign, and more. That metric has been provided by a not-for-profit audience measurement entity called Geopath for over 80 years.

But, what about that same type of analysis for indoor signs in places like airports, sporting venues and shopping malls? That precise information of where people move, what they see, and what their journeys look like hasn’t been available, until now. Geopath has partnered with Intermx, an analytics company providing contextualized population movement, to build a new breed of OOH audience measurement for the Out-Of-Home industry, and they’re using HERE Venue Maps to do it.

Utilizing detailed indoor location data from HERE, Intermx can identify the vast number of features of an indoor space. Where can pedestrians walk, and where can’t they walk? Where are the elevators and escalators? What are the precise details of each floor, from the food-court in the basement, to the movie theatre on the top floor, and everything in between?

Intermx leverages the HERE venue information to further contextualize datasets, curated from specialized sources, to ultimately profile the populations within the space. Mobile data is one of the key sets, since it can clearly provide locations and timestamps from mobile devices that are reporting location. This can help an analyst make confident inferences on population activity within an indoor space.

But, that’s not the only dataset Intermx is utilizing. When looking at mobile location data specifically, one may only draw conclusions from the population using mobile devices that were reporting data. On the other hand, there is a significant portion of any population that won’t be observed through mobile, and that missing population is equally as important when creating a useful, detailed picture of the people in a space.

For a clearer idea of these extra data sets, move the example to an airport. Once Intermx has the precise venue map from HERE, they can make estimations based on predictable activity within that space. How many flights are arriving on that day, and what are the number of passengers coming in? From what gates are those passengers arriving, at what times, and what percentage of them checked their bags? How many will move toward the rental car counters, versus how many will move to public transportation?

Using this combination of data sets, market segments and venue attributes, Intermx can contextualize information associated with a venue, then actively provide answers that the advertising and marketing industries need to have. Knowing the full population’s makeup and movement as it relates to in-venue activity enables Geopath to provide actionable insights to the out-of-home community.

This process of data discovery and distillation will be key for place-based advertisers, brands that advertise within venues, and the agencies that represent those brands. Intermx is taking a big step forward by combining mobile location, demographics, and survey data to understand people, and the places they visit.

Got an idea? Visit our developer page to learn how to put HERE Venue Maps to work for you.