Comparing IP solutions in advertising

James: So Pete, that's a great question. How is the advertising industry thinking about our product? One of the questions we get asked all the time is how do you compare to the competitors? Of course, ground truth is a real problem. So when you take an IP address, what is the actual true position of the device that's using that IP address? Well, the reality is with cellular networks, you've got the same IP address being used potentially across an entire country. So that can be a real problem. That's what it's.

Pete: And it's quite a cynical occasionally about IP, right?

James: Yeah, exactly. So what we've done here is we've taken the vendors that we can get access to who provide their service to be tested online effectively. And what we're then able to do is say, well, taking an average distance effectively between the locations returned from 52 random IP addresses, how far apart are they? And we can see actually the established competition are as far apart, if not more far apart than we are with them. So depending on the methodology that's used, you see. A different value effectively being returned. So when we talk about accuracy, the reality is no one is perfect. So claims about like zip code level accuracy are misleading. What we can really do is just be honest about what's happening. So sometimes if you're on residential or you're in retail, you might get to a postal address. But when you're cellular and you're going around the country or even here in Germany and actually your IP address is being routed out back home in the UK. All bets are off effectively. So what we're able to do is return a confidence value to basically say, well, what sort of business decisions could you make on the back of the information that we're returning? High confidence, make good business decisions, you can be confident in it. Low confidence, pretend you know nothing.

Pete: And knowing that alone is really powerful, right? Just knowing your confidence level. It's not everyone has that honest and transparent approach to discuss.

James: So the question really is how honest do the ad tech community want to be?

Pete: Well, and I think that's a really fair question because not everyone wants to own up to the fact that you can't always go and target a household. They don't want to say that bit out loud, but actually I think you earn more authority over time by saying it out loud. I think vendors that can potentially help you gage the confidence in which you look someone in the eye and say, yes, we can deliver against that brief, or, no, we cannot, that's powerful for me, but they're really good.

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