Weve launches Weve Locate verification solution

Weller: “Weve has an actual telco truth set to verify against.

O2-owned Weve has launched Weve Locate, which it claims is the UK’s first proprietary location verification technology. It compares app publisher GPS signals against O2’s cellular network to help advertisers better reach and attribute against target audiences, while at the same time delivering more relevant advertising.

According to a 2017 BIA/Kelsey study, location-targeted mobile ad spend will account for over 42 per cent of total mobile ad spend in 2018. However, the Location Based Marketing Association’s 2017 Global Location Trends Report found that 65 per cent of marketers had expressed concern around the quality of location data available in the market, and, says Weve, it is “widely perceived” that up to 80 per cent may be imprecise or fraudulent.

For example, an agency could be running a mobile advertising campaign to target audiences from London, but actually find they were delivering impressions against audiences from the north of England, due to the inaccurate and unverified nature of GPS-based app data available in market.

To address the problem, Weve is working with anonymised and aggregated O2-owned audience data and location partner Axonix to compare aggregated scores for app publisher GPS signals with the location of phones connected to any of O2’s UK cell towers, to verify location accuracy.

By aggregating millions of location comparisons, Axonix can index the sources of location data and score the quality of their location signals. This will enable Weve to eliminate bad data and unreliable sources, ensuring the verified location behaviours of audiences are reflected in campaign delivery and attribution.

“By comparing GPS co-ordinates with signals from cell towers, we can identify instances where an app publisher’s GPS signal tells us one thing but the devices’ cell tower location, its true location, tells us another,” said Axonix CEO, Simon Bailey.

Weve MD Martin Weller said: “Marketers have for some time heralded the importance of mobile location in their ad campaigns, alongside a rising industry trend of mistrust in the accuracy and efficacy of location based data sources. Other location providers rely on probabilistic modelling and pattern recognition to address this, whereas Weve has an actual telco truth set to verify against.”