Partner Spotlight: Q&A with HERE Technologies

Following on from the partnership announcement with HERE Technologies, we spoke to Director, Head of Media, Advertising and Telco, Herve Utheza.

Question 1: How long have you been at HERE Technologies and what is your role?

I joined HERE Technologies about a year and a half ago to run a new, innovative go-to-market approach in Media & Advertising. Coming from the world of premium content, data and advertising, I saw that HERE Technologies has a formidable asset with its location data. At a time when 5G is right around the corner, when data scientists in AdTech are refining the segmentation & attribution work they do, the global, deep, our advanced “geometry data of the world”, such as building footprints and POIs, is an essential ingredient to improve campaign performance. My group also handles the Telco industry, so we have a unique vantage point to look at the horizon and see where all of this is converging.

Question 2: How does HERE Technologies help solve marketer challenges?

We have a unique position in the market, in that we are a neutral, global, scale player.

We do not buy or sell media; we enhance capabilities with our data, platform services, the data science of the marketers and their ecosystem partners.

Our data covers 200+ countries, so from day one we can help a marketer enhance their campaigns on a global basis, instead of losing time patching together various datasets.

We have more than 9,000 employees in 55 countries, and we support location services for the largest brands out there.

At a time when marketers are reaching out to the consumers directly through loyalty apps and online presence, they are turning into publishers. With our mobile client offerings, we have solutions for that side of their operations, too.

Engaging and delivering stellar consumer experiences with routing and navigation to and from destinations, and preparing for the future of Augmented Reality, are part and parcel of what we do daily, at scale.

Question 3: What benefits does the HERE integration with Blis bring to the AdTech ecosystem?

In a nutshell, we are bringing together a global database of places into your Blis data science algorithms and platform. HERE Places, our global database, covers more than 140 million places; HERE continuously updates it, keeping it fresh and accurate through our own data creation processes, and the global ingestion of data we source from our ecosystem. This means that a global brand marketer campaign can now be more precise.

Question 4: What is one piece of advice you would give a marketer who is (and is not) using location data right now?

Start small: It’s OK to experiment. Start using a few campaigns engagements with Blis, then refine, repeat and improve over time. To do location intelligence well, you have to be in it for the long haul.

Learn: Location intelligence brings together the geometry of the world and the dynamic location signals of consumer mobile applications. The field is changing fast, with advanced scrutiny on the privacy practices of everyone involved. This is a good thing. Incorporating this into your practices now is essential to being relevant in two, five or 10 years.

Look at the complete picture: A brand will have its own set of places, locations and addresses of, for example, its restaurants, stores, points of sales, etc. Look at what you can you bring to the table. Blis and HERE Technologies look at value creation in a partnership way. Look at the logistics problems of your supply chain; maybe there is something we can do to help in this domain as well. We now live in a world where mobile objects and humans interact, from the warehouse to the delivery truck, from the store to the end destination.

This is a very disruptive moment; marketers need to embrace the change.

Question 5: What data trends does the digital marketer of 2019 need to keep up on for 2019?

Privacy and consent management. Whether in Europe or North America, brands and their ecosystems must take a consumer-first approach to privacy and consumer experiences. Europe’s GDPR and the evolving U.S. privacy regulations are there to help do one thing better: deliver consumers the personalized, free (advertising-supported) experiences and products they like. Therefore, brands and marketers, and their partners (agencies and the AdTech industry), must take an active part in designing stellar experiences that make a consumer want to “opt-in”.

HERE Technologies ran a global survey in 2018 on privacy. We discovered that more than 80% of consumers think sharing their location data to enable a safe, streamlined navigation route is a good reason to share that data. It’s a bit “motherhood and apple pie”, but we believe that the future of advertising creative, such as the design of loyalty apps, will take this into account.

In 2019, it’s time to experiment, and build stellar products and partnerships.

Question 6: If there was one piece of content you think every marketer should read, what is it? (Other than this blog post of course!)

Read and learn about what 5G is bringing to the market, in terms of improved precision in location signals, ability to connect all screens, connected cars, digital out-of-home and powering Augmented Reality experiences, both outdoors and indoors. This wave is upon us, and the time to prepare for it is now.

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