Why 7 of the 11 Fortune 100 auto companies are AdNear clients

Who wouldn’t want a client list that includes seven of the 11 auto companies in Fortune 100? What Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Honda, Nissan, and BMW have in common, apart from being some of the world’s top car brands, is that they are all clients of AdNear.

To understand why they need AdNear, you have to go to the genesis of this Indian adtech firm, now headquartered in Singapore. The team tried to map the location of mobile devices without having to rely on GPS (which most people either don’t have or switch off to save battery). For about three years, starting from 2009, thousands of people were hired in cities across India to drive around with mapping devices, logging mobile towers and wifi zones as well as other geographical signposts. This was tedious, expensive and time-consuming, but it paid off big time.

The mobile and app revolution made this unique geo-location data a gold mine. Now, as soon as you enter a mapped zone and open any app on your phone, AdNear tracks a device’s location based on its proximity to a known wifi hotspot or cell tower. No personally identifiable data like phone numbers are recorded in order to comply with privacy regulations, but a unique ID can be assigned to the device. So, the next time it shows up in some other zone, the tracker knows it’s probably you.

AdNear launched in November 2012, armed with this unique geo-location map coupled with millions of user profiles, or device profiles, if you like. The company makes intelligent guesses about you based on where your device hangs out – if days are spent on campus, you’re probably a student. Or if the phone shows up on an Aussie beach day after day, most likely it belongs to a ‘beach-bum’ Down Under. And beach-wear brands would love to target their mobile ads at these people.

Now you begin to understand the value of AdNear’s dataset to the big auto companies – instead of throwing their ads out into the ether and hoping for the best, they can target auto enthusiasts. And in a mobile-first world, with brands jostling for consumer attention on a small screen, the more intelligent the targeting, the better the chances of getting a response.

Quarter of a billion user profiles and growing fast

Backed by Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners, AdNear moved its headquarters from Bangalore to Singapore last year. Today, it has a dataset of close to a quarter of a billion user profiles and 7.2 billion location points in 5,100 cities (defined as places with a population of over 100,000) mostly in India, Australia, Southeast Asia – and now, rising rapidly over Japan. Every day, 1.2 million user profiles are being added.

Anil Mathews, founder and CEO of AdNear, justifiably calls it a big data company now, given its humongous dataset which can be sliced and diced to provide unique insights to brands looking to target specific customer segments.

At the outset, AdNear profiled travelers in airports, shoppers in grocery stores or malls, high net-worth individuals spending days downtown and nights in rich suburbs, students on campus and home-makers who spend the day in residential areas. As brands started getting traction on those, they wanted to drill deeper.

Mathews charts out for Tech in Asia how this grew: “Audi in Singapore wanted us to target car enthusiasts. The easiest way was to look at anybody engaged with automobile-related apps, those spotted at auto shows or around car dealers, and create profiles based on that. It got so interesting that we started creating custom segments for brands, taking in suggestions from them and enhancing those. This also helped us win longer-term campaigns. The usual campaigns in mobile advertising are for a month. We are now getting half-year or even year-long campaigns with brands.”

From auto majors and telcos to Coca Cola

Land of the rising sun, here we come