Impersonally Identifiable Information

Can marketers serve up relevant offerings on the Web to a never-before-seen site visitor? Quova Inc. offers a geography-based identification service based on surfers’ IP addresses. Direct Newsline spoke with Quova president and CEO Marie Alexander about the opportunities and limitations IP address-based efforts afford marketers.

Direct Newsline: For direct marketers, what is the value of being able to capture IP address, when so much of what they do is based off personally identifiable information?

Alexander: Marketers were given access to billions of customers on the Internet, but were told they should go after them one at a time. But when you look at what retailers and businesses have done for decades, they have marketed to geographic areas, and done so quite successfully. We are trying to mirror what they have done in the physical world back into the Internet.

Retailers have geographic sales trends, people in physical locations, inventories in physical locations and stores in physical locations, and there are trends associated with all of those locations. If I am a major retailer that has regional outlets around the globe, I might want to be selling bikinis in Miami while I am selling sweaters in San Francisco. I do that in my stores without knowing anything about a specific individual who is coming in.

Online, the value of looking at an anonymous IP address is that it’s not necessary that marketers know who browsers are in order to put information and content and products in front of them that make it a better experience for them, and to get them the things they are looking for.

Direct Newsline: How do the marketing applications of this differ for B-to-B vs. consumer-focused companies?

Alexander: I would say in most cases where our data is being used, the majority are consumer firms. For both B-to-B and consumer firms, if a marketer wanted to determine whether their competitors were coming into their web site, or if they have major account with someone, they may want to have their web site perform differently based on what company is coming in.

Direct Newsline: Does your offering risk being irrelevant, given the portability of mobile devices which are used to access the web?

Alexander: While I think you will begin to see a rise in mobile activity, the number is low now. Our business is focused on a web site’s ability to target people’s ability to target who is coming in. Only 2.5% of traffic is coming in from mobile customers – and that’s traffic, not transactions.

There are some instances, such as gambling, insurance, pharmaceutical or licensed content, where there are state or country regulations that require knowing where a prospect is before a transaction is legal. With mobile technology right now, you have to have user permission to locate that person. With an IP address, because you are not locating a specific person – you’re talking to a ZIP code – you don’t have to have user opt-in. You’re not dealing with personally identifiable information.

The applications where you can see [opt in] used are environments where users have incentive to let you locate them to that detail. For just the weather, you don’t want to go through that process. But to be able to watch a [licensed, with potential blackout areas] baseball game, customers will go through that process so they can watch it on a mobile device.

Direct Newsline: How would a marketer use IP addresses to augment an offline campaign?

Alexander: If I am running an offline campaign, the first thing I could do is measure effectiveness. If I do a big advertising broadcast in Atlanta, or public relations in Peoria, I could see if the effort drove more traffic from those geographies by looking at the time of day and actual numbers of visitors to my site. I’d have ground proof of that campaign’s effectiveness on my Web site.

If I am running a promotion, and I spend money on television, print, brochures or coupons in the mail, you can coordinate so people from those regions see exactly the same thing on your web site. You have represented a unified front, giving them the same experience regardless of which method touched them.

Direct Newsline: How does using IP addresses bump up against regulations on personally identifiable information?

Alexander: According to all legislation we have worked on and have evaluated, you are very safe in using an IP address for this type of targeting. I would caution that if marketers begin to store IP addresses in an account, they may be putting themselves in a situation where they have created issues.

But the bigger thing is they will be disappointed in the results, because of the nature of IP address being assigned to multiple individuals. In a Starbucks, those IP addresses could change every 15 minutes. You can do generic trending regarding how people do in that location, but you can’t look at individuals.