Quova Updates Geo-Targeting Products with Ads in Mind

Geolocation technology provider Quova has revamped its product lineup to offer a suite of vertical IP targeting solutions, including one for content providers and another for advertisers.

The suite of data and service offerings includes vertical solutions for fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, geo-targeted marketing, and digital content distribution. Each vertical solution was developed based on customer implementations of Quova’s technology over the past five years, according to Gary Jackson, Quova’s COO.

“We’ve been doing research on all the information that can be correlated to an IP address for five years. It’s become obvious that certain pieces of information are more important to some industries than others,” Jackson said. “Over time, we’ve expanded the detail around each industry’s requirements and packaged them in a service that’s easier to consume.”

For marketers, the Quova Marketing solution is designed to simplify the process of serving geo-targeted ads. A new feature allows marketers to offer customized local content. Ads can be localized to move specific products or drive traffic to particular local stores, and Web content can be customized by language, currency, product/pricing preferences and cultural priorities. Quova Marketing also tells ad servers whether a user has a broadband or dial-up connection, and then serves up a rich media ad or a simple banner.

Quova has worked with more than a dozen providers of ad serving technology, and several large portals, so advertisers have several options for delivering their geo-targeted ads, Jackson said.

Some of Quova’s clients are using the technology to ensure that consumers see the same ads with the same messages across online and offline media, based on their location.

“This is a concept that’s been obvious to marketers for years. If you concentrate your message to an area where the person you want to impact sees it multiple times in the same way, the likelihood of having success with it goes up dramatically,” Jackson said.

For content owners, the new Quova Media solution addresses location-based digital rights management issues. MLB Advanced Media, the interactive media arm of Major League Baseball, is using the solution to manage its MLB.TV offering while respecting each team’s regional broadcast rights. It has also been used by T-Systems and ZDF in Germany to offer live online coverage of the Tour de France and the World Track and Field Championships last summer.

Data is tagged with a confidence rating, so clients can choose how strictly they will restrict their content from being served outside of the appropriate region. The BBC, for example, uses Quova’s technology to limit much of its content to the UK, but will be more strict with content it has licensed from others, such as the Olympics, than with its own content, which does not carry the same penalties for being delivered outside the region, Jackson said.

“Where we provide value to media companies is in interpreting the data, including providing a ‘confidence factor’ for each element,” Jackson said. The confidence factor would be affected by the connection route, including whether a user is connected via a satellite, is using a proxy server, and other factors.

“The media space is emerging in a very dramatic way. More and more content will become available on the Internet, and most of that delivery has certain restrictions to it based on geography,” he said.

Quova can supply 32 distinct data points from an IP address, but the relevant information to use for marketing or media is different than the relevant information for security and fraud-detection purposes. To help lower the barriers to entry for its technology, Quova has created a set of preconfigured solutions’ that help companies focus on the data, business rules, and reports that are most meaningful for each vertical.

Each vertical solution includes a market-specific edition of Quova’s GeoPoint database of IP geolocation data, each highlighting the data elements most relevant to each type of use.

Even with the most relevant data at hand, most companies would not be prepared to interpret or act on the data, Jackson said. To address this, Quova has also beefed up its consulting and professional services practices, creating industry-specific teams with specific deliverables to speed implementation, define appropriate business rules, and provide support to clients.