Spatial

Spatial.ai is an AI-powered geosocial data tool that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to categorize billions of unstructured data points and predict behavior. The company was founded in 2016 by Will and Lyden with a goal to build a dataset that uncovers the "human layer" using location-based social data. By using billions of data points, Social.ai provides real-time predictive decisions, allowing brands to create personalized promotions for their customers. Spatial.ai is the Realcomm IBcon 2019 Digie Award Winner, both the Audience Favorite and Judges' Favorite, reaffirming its innovative approach to geosocial data.

TLDR

Spatial.ai is an AI-powered geosocial data tool that uses advanced machine learning algorithms to predict behavior. It offers a real-time PersonaLive segmentation system that categorizes customers and visits, an insights and comparison tool, a segment and audience builder, mobile visitation data, and social media advertising. It helps businesses understand their customers' behaviors and preferences and adapt quickly to their evolving needs, improving customer engagement and loyalty. Spatial.ai integrates with Near, Safegraph, and Placer.ai, allowing users to upload data from these providers quickly and efficiently. The company was awarded the Realcomm IBcon 2019 Digie Award Winner, and its innovative approach to geosocial data provides a future where commerce and cities are designed for humans rather than demographics.

Company Overview

Spatial.ai is an AI-powered tool that harnesses geosocial data to categorize billions of unstructured data points into quantifiable people and places segments, revealing trends and predicting behavior. Founded in 2016 by Will and Lyden, the company's goal was to build a dataset that uncovers the "human layer" using location-based social data. By tapping into the insights shared by billions of individuals on social media, Spatial.ai aims to provide real-time predictive decisions, replacing traditional reliance on demographics and surveys.

The company has revolutionized customer understanding with its Geosocial Proximity dataset, which measures geotagged activity in an area. Spatial.ai's Geosocial Proximity has been utilized by over 100 retailers and restaurants to predict sales based on categorizing billions of unstructured data points using advanced AI algorithms, providing a competitive edge for businesses. Due to its innovative approach, Spatial.ai was awarded the Realcomm IBcon 2019 Digie Award Winner, both the Audience Favorite and Judges' Favorite.

Spatial.ai's innovative approach to anonymous redistribution of data points to home block groups at scale resulted in the development of the PersonaLive™ segmentation system, which continues to challenge traditional demographics as a comprehensive categorization system. This system is designed to predict behavior based on geosocial data, leading to a future where commerce and cities are designed for humans rather than demographics. With the recent announcement of $2.1 million in funding led by Serra Ventures, the future of Spatial.ai and its impact on Geosocial AI is looking bright.

Features

PersonaLive™ Segmentation System

Real-time behavioral segmentation

The PersonaLive™ segmentation system is the world's first real-time behavioral segmentation system that organizes customers into one of 80 behavioral segments based on their social media, brand visitation, and website interests. It matches these interactions using address as a link, allowing businesses to capitalize on trends that meet customers in the moment and adapt to their conversations. This system fills missing gaps in first-party data by layering in customer's digital data, allowing brands to discover what their customers are talking about and what brands influence them. Businesses can also identify brand synergies and competitors by seeing the retail, restaurant, service, grocery, and fitness locations their customers visit.

Organic panel of over 200 million consumers

Unlike current segmentation solutions that have marketing teams shooting in the dark using demographics or making guesses based on surveys, the PersonaLive™ segmentation system leverages an always-on, organic panel of over 200 million consumers to make traditionally qualitative decisions a hard science. It analyzes the digital behaviors of over 300 million users, revealing what customers do, the stores they visit, websites they search, and the brands and people they follow on social media.

Segment strategy tool

For every customer upload, the PersonaLive™ segmentation system passes back a segment strategy tool that includes summarized insights on customers and interactive graphs that provide immediate insights. This segmentation system helps businesses understand how contextual behaviors like social and mobile behaviors impact customer spending, allowing them to create on-target campaigns, creative, and deploy on digital channels effectively.

Mobile Visitation Data

Identifies customers who visit stores

The PersonaLive™ system segments store visitors to reveal the “who” behind the mobile visit. Mobile Visitation Data has taken the retail and real estate market by storm in the last five years. However, companies still struggle to answer a simple question: Who are these people and what do they want? This segmentation system helps companies understand customer behavior and preferences to improve their in-store experiences by identifying customers who visit their stores, their interests, and what they want from the experience.

Bridges the digital gap for Brick & Mortar retailers

Unlike e-commerce native brands, Brick & Mortar retailers don’t have the opportunity to capture the online presence of their in-store consumers. The PersonaLive™ segmentation system helps retailers bridge the digital gap by allowing them to segment and retarget customers who have made in-store purchases online. This integration enables retailers to increase their online presence and create more opportunities to reach their customers effectively.

Improves geosocial datasets

Geodemographics have been used since the early 1970s for catchment analysis and site selection. Geosocial datasets help fit the right businesses to the right locations by capturing the activity and interests of the area (Proximity) and organizing households by their retail and social behavior (PersonaLive™) instead of demographics alone. The combination reduces error in selecting sites and sets the new location up for a strategic market launch campaign.

Social Media Advertising

Identifying key traits

The PersonaLive™ segmentation system takes the guesswork out of social media advertising by identifying the key traits of a business's best customers and seamlessly activating individuals with those exact behavioral traits on social media. The system fills in the missing gaps on those individuals who might not share their entire life on social, which would have been missed by looking at social media alone. This reduces error in the selection of the right target audience, and businesses can reach only those customers who are interested in their content.

Data-backed campaigns

Geosocial segmentation inspires data-backed “hunches” by fueling the segmentation with a business's historical data, revealing core customers and hidden opportunities. It further focuses ad spend by hitting only the right people on the right channels. PersonaLive™ allows businesses to subscribe to segment updates and to tell them when a topic goes viral for a particular audience so that they can show up on the right content to the right people. This improves real-time engagement with customers and facilitates the creation of engaging content.

Reacting in real-time

Socially viral content deters marketers from acting in real-time with their customers for two reasons. First, they aren’t sure what their customers are commenting on or interested in. Second, the opportunity has often come and gone before they know it. The PersonaLive™ system allows businesses to strike while the iron is hot. They can respond to the customers' comments in real-time by using the insights provided by the system, creating instant engagements that help to build brand awareness and trust.

PersonaLive™ Secure Data Upload

Secure data matching

Businesses can upload their customer data file to the PersonaLive™ secure online platform to match records and segments their corresponding PersonaLive™ segment using their address. This system provides businesses with insights into each customer's interests, behaviors, social media engagements, and preferences, allowing them to create targeted campaigns and personalized experiences to retain customers.

Summarized insights and interactive graphs

PersonaLive™ provides businesses with access to summarized insights on their customers and interactive graphs that provide immediate insights for every customer upload. Those insights help businesses understand their customers' behaviors and preferences and adapt quickly to their evolving needs. This allows them to create personalized and targeted campaigns that improve customer engagement and loyalty.

Contextual understanding of customer data

PersonaLive™ helps businesses understand how the behavioral context (social, mobile, website behaviors, etc.) impacts customer spending and vice versa. This essentially helps businesses to identify their customers' preferences, interests, and behavior, which are essential for creating campaigns personalized to their specific needs. PersonaLive™ empowers businesses to leverage unique insights to create more targeted campaigns and deploy them to digital channels that are more efficient and effective at gaining customer engagement and loyalty.

Integrations

The PersonaLive Platform by Spatial comes with a suite of useful tools to work with the segments and families, allowing users to do some pretty incredible stuff. Here are some specific integrations:

Insights Tool

The insight tool is designed to answer the question "What segments matter to my brand?" by giving users a quick way to rank segments on their likelihood to follow or visit thousands of brands, influencers, and topics. The tool generates an index of how likely a given segment is to engage with a brand or topic. For example, the index value of 200 would indicate that a segment is twice as likely to visit or follow. Using the insight tool, users can search for visitation and social data and immediately see people's interests and preferences. The insight tool also offers the option to include custom metrics, allowing users to compare segments by their behavior related to the brand. The result produces an index score; users can see a breakdown of their social following and in-store visitation for any major brand or influencer.

Comparison Tool

The comparison tool can quickly compare brands or the users' own metrics. This feature allows users to segment their customers who already have an index score for each segment's likelihood to be a customer. This enables a brand to identify potential co-marketing or partnership opportunities. Users can upload their customer data and sales into the "File Upload" tool and begin comparing segments by their behavior related to the brand. For example, the picture above shows the percentage of segments who have bought Sportswear from an ecommerce brand.

Segment Builder

With the Segment Builder integration, users can combine segments on-the-fly and generate their segments by selecting and naming the desired segments. Users can find a group of segments over-indexing in buying one particular product and combine them to build an entirely unique segment entirely composed of people who over-index for that particular behavior. Users can also bring it into audiences and target new potential customers in those segments online with offers of that particular product.

Audience Builder

The Audience Builder is designed to enable brands to target top segments online with personalized advertising. The tool allows brands to choose their preferred platform and run their ad to target net new customers across social media, direct mail, and demand-side platforms. Users can filter their audience based on location, gender, and other relevant data points. To port the audience, users will receive an email requesting an ID for the specific platform. Once the ID is provided, the audience will be ported to the desired platform. Brands can also upload data from any provider and wait for their data to be segmented.

File Upload Tool

The File Upload Tool allows users to segment either foot traffic visits or customer data to their location. To segment foot traffic data, users should upload foot traffic, aka mobile visitation data from their provider, which includes home location or common evening location of the visitor. The data should come from any provider. Users can also segment customer data by uploading the data to receive the segments of each customer. The platform will match whatever information users can provide to match an individual household. In cases where the platform can't match a customer at a name/address level, Spatial will use the block group or zip code to assign the segment.

Special Integrations

Spatial has pre-built special integrations with Near, Safegraph, and Placer.ai, allowing users to upload data from these providers and go through the process smoothly and quickly. The platform uses a weighted average of the visits to a site using the segment distribution in the area, which that device originates from, to generate accurate output. By providing more specific data like lat/lon, users can produce finer results.

FAQ

What is PersonaLive and how is it different from other geodemographic segmentation systems?

PersonaLive is a tool that segments individuals based on their social media activity, web visitation patterns, mobile movement data, and demographics. It breaks people into 80 segments by using a combination of these factors, rather than just demographics like other geodemographic segmentation systems. The base unit of PersonaLive is a person, whereas the base unit of other systems like Proximity and GeoWeb is a block group. PersonaLive is built at the household level, meaning that there are multiple segments in every block group. Each individual belongs to only one segment.

How are individuals bucketed into segments?

Individuals are bucketed into one of the 80 PersonaLive segments using a combination of three factors: social media activity, web visitation patterns, and mobile movement data. Each individual belongs in only one segment. After significant life changes, such as moving, having a child, or getting married, an individual's segment may change. The segments are ordered within each of the 17 families in the taxonomy by the highest income to the lowest within the family.

What is an index in PersonaLive and how is it calculated?

An index measures a segment's propensity to do something compared to the national average, with a score of 100 being the national average. An index score of 200 means a segment is twice as likely, and 300 means a segment is three times as likely, to perform a particular action as the average American. For example, if a segment has an index score of 366 for visiting Tractor Supply Co., that means they are 3.66x more likely than the average American to walk into a Tractor Supply Co. PersonaLive's indexes allow for easy comparisons between different segments and can be used to direct media budget allocation and ad placements.

How does PersonaLive determine a typical head of household age and income for each segment?

Since PersonaLive primarily categorizes people based on behavior rather than demographics, segments will not conform perfectly to any one income, age, or race bucket. PersonaLive uses a combination of the highest indexing and highest percentage age and income range buckets according to the US census to provide the typical head of household age and income for each segment.

What are channel preferences in PersonaLive and how are they generated?

Channel preferences measure a segment's overall propensity to multiple accounts within a category, based on social media following data. They are designed to direct media budget allocation and ad placements. The channel preferences radar map shows where each segment is most engaged across magazines, websites, news publications, podcasts, TV channels, and TV shows. By looking at the exact publications underneath each channel, advertisers can choose which websites to place ads on more intelligently, reducing wasted ad spend and controlling the context in which a person sees an ad.