Archive for the ‘Population Data’ Category

Population Intelligence for Restaurants

Posted on: September 19th, 2023 by Jaclyn Giordano

Population Intelligence Delivers a Competitive Advantage for Restaurant Growth

Restaurant sales rose for the 6th straight month this year, according to the National Restaurant Association. In fact, restaurant spending outpaced all other retail sectors with an increase of 4%, compared to only 1% of non-restaurant retail. 

With over 1 million plus restaurant locations in the US and consumer demand on the rise, sparking a growing number of new openings, Motionworks® population intelligence can deliver the competitive edge to keep your restaurant growing in a saturated market. 

What is Motionworks®

Motionworks® provides past, present, and predictive insights on how the total population moves throughout the physical world. Everywhere. All the time.  

Our Citycast™ proprietary Population Intelligence Platform insights suite, delivers restaurant marketers answers to population movement as it relates to the roads we travel on, the ads we see on billboards, the retailers we visit and the places we choose to vacation. This means, with Motionworks® Population Intelligence, restaurants can make business decisions more confidently, based on human behavior in an aggregated AND privacy compliant way.  

How Can Motionworks® Help Restaurants? 

Allow us to introduce you to the Placecast® and Popcast™ products that deliver insights into the places people visit, as well as, how they move about the world throughout the day in your restaurant trade area.  

What is Placecast®

Placecast® provides robust visitation insights into millions of POIs (points of interest) across the US. These POIs include small locations, such as stand-alone fast-food restaurants, large geographies, such as city centers and regional parks, and even billboards on the side of the road.

Restaurants can understand who is visiting a POI (points of interest), how long they are staying, the neighborhoods they live in, how often they visit, and what they like to consume.  

How Can Placecast® Empower Your Restaurant Business?

Foot Traffic Analytics: How do my daily traffic patterns compare to my competition? 

Location planning: Is there an opportunity to open a new location based on the geographic area customers are traveling from?  

Attribution analysis: Did our business grow in the zip codes where we leveraged direct mail? 

 

Placecast® in Action:

What is Popcast™? 

Popcast ™ allows you to visualize the population of Motionworks® along with custom cohorts occupying specific geographies throughout the day in the US. Popcast™ allows restaurants to look at population data from the zip code level all the way up to state geographies. 

How can Popcast™ empower your restaurant business? 

Audience activation: Where is my ideal restaurant customer composition geographically located to maximize my marketing efforts and increase ROI with my direct mail, local radio, and OOH (Out of Home) campaigns?  

Customer acquisition: Where can I find more of my best patrons to scale and how can I reach my competitors’ customers as they move throughout the day to conquest?   

Location planning: Where should I consider opening my next organic restaurant based on where potential health-conscious people live? 

Three easy ways to access Motionworks® Population Intelligence: 

  1. API: Direct integration into third-party platforms 
  2. Snowflake: Download data directly 
  3. Citycast ™: Motionworks® proprietary platform 

The Motionworks® team is here to empower you with reliable and robust Population Intelligence to make restaurant growth decisions with confidence. Connect with us for a demo today.  

Introducing Placecast® Syndicated 

Posted on: September 1st, 2023 by Jaclyn Giordano

Placecast® Syndicated provides robust insights into visitation to points of interest (POIs) across North America.

Location intelligence has never been more important and valuable for business decision makers as we move into a cookie-less, digital world with increasing regulations on privacy compliance. It’s becoming more difficult for marketers to find their target online in a fragmented digital universe. More decision makers are utilizing population intelligence data on how people move in the physical world. Where they live, where they work, where they play and where they travel are just a few data points helping marketers make more intelligent decisions. 

This post will help you understand everything you need to know about Motionworks® Placecast® Syndicated location data intelligence.

What is Placecast® Syndicated?

Placecast® Syndicated provides robust insights into visitation to points of interest (POIs) across North America in the Motionworks® Citycast™ platform. Motionworks® POIs include small locations, such as stand-alone fast food restaurants, large geographies, such as a beach or state park, and even billboards on the side of a road. 

Users can understand who is visiting a POI, how long they are staying, the neighborhoods they live in, how often they visit, and what they like to buy – making it a valuable tool for any business to utilize for intelligent decision-making. 

What type of location data intelligence does it provide?

Weekly activity. Get insights on historical and near-real time location data on the weekly activity history of places and regions from the beginning of 2019 to present.

Audience Insights. Understand and analyze in-depth profiling information on the types of people who visited a place or region. This includes information on standard demographics such as age, income, and race. It also provides  information on thousands of audience segments such as brand preferences, intent to purchase, media consumption, political affiliation, banking, and more. 

Origin Information. Placecast® Syndicated contains robust data on the neighborhoods in which visitors live. This data is anonymously aggregated to zip codes, counties, CBSAs, DMAs, or State so that users can understand which areas are contributing the most visitation to their venue (or their competitors’ venues) to optimize marketing, site selection, and more.  

What types of population activity is analyzed?

Motionworks® believes in responsible data and has established normative dwell thresholds by venue type to determine what constitutes an actual visit versus a drop off or a someone simply passing by.

Users can analyze location visitation activity by visits, dropoffs, passbys and stays. In addition, the location data can be broken out by total visits in any given week or unique visits, just like website analytics. Motionworks® even provides the ability to remove employees, or cut the data based on local versus non-local visitation.

How can Placecast® empower your business?

Foot Traffic Analytics. 

What zip codes should I be using with my direct mail campaign to grow repeat business on current visitors?

What are the population analytics on my best performing stores?

How do my daily traffic patterns compare to my competition?

Location planning. 

Is there an opportunity to open a new location based on the geographic areas customers are traveling from?

What is the best place in the city to open a new store based on competitor traffic performance?

Is this commercial property the best place to lease based on who my target demographic is?

Accelerating Advertising Revenue.

Do I have the right geographical media coverage based on where my customers are traveling from?

How can I optimize my digital media based on my top performing zip codes?

What cable TV zones should I consider to maximize my marketing investment?

Attribution analysis.

Is our messaging growing the desired demographic age group?

Did our business grow in the zip codes where we leveraged direct mail?

Are my marketing efforts impacting visitations?

Placecast® Syndicated in action: Example

Myrtle Beach, SC was recently named the #1 fastest-growing place in the US. (source: Real Estate-US News)

Looking at location data for a local Home Depot in our Citycast™ platform, the population appears to be doing some home improvement projects as they settle into this vacation hot spot. Check a few data visitation data points below. 

Three Easy Ways to Access Placecast® Syndicated Location Data Intelligence: 

  1. API: Direct integration into third-party platforms.
  2. Snowflake: Download data directly.
  3. Citycast™: Motionworks® proprietary software. 

 

Ready to dive into Placecast® Syndicated? We’re here to help. Book a demo here.

Motionworks® Primer Series: Synthetic Populations

Posted on: August 15th, 2023 by Jaclyn Giordano

Motionworks® Primer Series: Synthetic Populations

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are valuable techniques to speed up processes, lower costs, and provide more accurate solutions. In addition, they provide better insights to inform businesses and improve infrastructure in industry verticals such as urban planning, retail, finance, real estate, advertising, marketing, autonomous vehicles, and travel and tourism.

The amount of data required to train these models properly is massive. In order to overcome this obstacle, companies utilize “synthetic data.” By training models with synthetic data, companies are able to overcome challenges such as incomplete datasets, privacy issues, data cleansing, and more. Motionworks® uses a specific type of synthetic data to fuel its Population Intelligence – synthetic population data.

This primer will help you understand everything you need to know about Motionworks’® use of a synthetic population to generate mobility data.

Motionworks® has developed an innovative and cutting-edge approach to population intelligence, revolutionizing the way we harness data for insights. Central to our methodology is the strategic integration of a synthetic or digital population.

It’s important to note that the term “synthetic” may raise eyebrows, suggesting a sense of artificiality, but in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Let’s explore.

What is a Synthetic Population?

A synthetic population, also known as a digital population, is a duplicate of the real population often generated by machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI).

The incorporation of synthetic data stands as a legitimate and often-used technique, garnering widespread adoption and implementation across diverse industry verticals. From optimizing pivotal business decisions to enhancing urban infrastructure, fortifying financial safeguards, fostering improved health outcomes, and more. Synthetic data has emerged as an indispensable tool driving progress in the world of research and analytics.

In today’s dynamic landscape, where companies often their research solutions as comprehensive portrayals of the total population, the truth is that representing the complete spectrum of society in a responsible and accurate manner presents formidable challenges. Even in the unlikely scenario that a business was to acquire all the deterministic mobile data accessible in the United States, it would still represent a mere fraction of the movement of the total population.

By artfully interweaving real-world data with a meticulously crafted synthetic population database, Motionworks ®transcends the limitations of conventional approaches. Through the synergy of real-world and synthetic data, we chart a course towards a more nuanced and profound understanding of human mobility and behaviors without the need for skirting ethical issues and privacy regulations.

How is a Synthetic Population Developed?

In order to create a synthetic population, Motionworks® takes the information that it knows about each census block group – such as the demographics and distribution of the people who live there. Then, using artificial intelligence, Motionworks® creates a fully representative model of the total population. The synthetic population looks like the real population in all the ways that are important to Motionworks®, including age, income, ethnicity, gender, and how many people live in each dwelling.

The concept of a synthetic population may seem a bit confusing, but it is very similar to what is happening in some of the most common consumer-focused artificial intelligence applications today.

Many people are familiar with online art generators that are powered by AI, such as Nightcafe.

In order to create these applications, AI models are fed countless images of artwork that were created by real humans. After rounds and rounds of machine learning, the AI gets better and better at creating its own synthetic artwork, and eventually, it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the synthetic art created by AI and the art created by humans.

A simple prompt of “a beautiful sunset in autumn” generates a piece of art that contains all of the elements of a sunset in autumn, the sky, trees with amber leaves, clouds – but it was synthetically generated. This is very similar to the way a synthetic population is created. A synthetic population looks, feels, moves, and behaves just like the real population.

Synthetic Population in Action: An Example

Imagine that a city wants to understand what will happen to the traffic flow if adds toll booths every two miles on the highway. Rather than building the toll booths and then dealing with real life repercussions, the toll booths can be “built” in a simulated environment.

Since the synthetic population still needs to get to work on time and pick up the kids after school, they will still go about their day, but will encounter the synthetic toll booths, which will then impact how long it takes them to get to their destinations. The simulated people may opt to take an alternate routes or leave earlier in the morning. Their may be traffic jams, slow-downs, an influx of traffic on bridges and tunnels, or increased traffic on residential streets. The impact of this many tolls in such proximity, would undoubtedly have an impact on the flow of traffic throughout the city as well as the drain on the city’s infrastructure.

Utilizing a synthetic population, the city is able to understand the impact of the tolls without ever having to build a single booth. In fact, the city can test multiple permutations of installations – varying the count and distance of toll booth installations and can use the insights generated to make better infrastructure decisions on behalf of its residents.

Motionworks® utilizes its Synthetic Population to help predict real world outcomes when hypothetical changes are made to the way people move about their day. These changes may be toll booth installations such as those discussed above, or may involve situations such as emergency city evacuations, double of the population in a geography, building a new shopping center, or installing public transportation options. We call this “Futurecasting.”

The Advantages of Using a Synthetic Population

There are many important reasons that Motionworks® utilizes a synthetic population as a core part of its methodology including:

Privacy.

Motionworks® is committed to providing insights in an anonymized, aggregated, and privacy-compliant way across all of our solutions. Motionworks® data does not provide insights into individual behaviors and cannot be reverse-engineered or manipulated to provide such information. Utilizing synthetic populations to understand population behavior is recognized as a process that preserves the confidentiality of individuals while providing realistic, representative data outputs.

Total Population Metrics.

The Motionworks® approach is developed to measure everyone, everywhere, all the time, rather than measuring device activity within a target polygon. There is no source of deterministic data available today that can provide persistent, accurate information on the location of every individual in the country. Only through the use of a synthetic population derived from a large deterministic data sample is total population measurement achievable.

Granularity.

The Motionworks® data set that is produced from this synthetic population reflects where everyone in the country is at any given moment in aggregation, allowing the data to be cut in a variety of ways and geographic resolutions while maintaining integrity.

How Synthetic Populations Are Validated

Motionworks® validates its Synthetic Population against multiple datasets in each geography. In the United States, it is validated against the US Census and Claritas Popfacts. In Canada, it’s validated against the Canadian Census and Environics Analytics. Our synthetic population aligns very closely with these datasets. More detailed information on our validation is available for the United States and Canada.

Key Use Cases of Synthetic Populations

It’s not just Motionworks® that uses synthetic population analytics. Many major companies are using this type of data to make better business decisions daily.

Marrying Synthetic Data with Real Data to Generate Population Intelligence

Our work does not stop with the generation of the Synthetic Population dataset, although many clients may find that database a worthwhile product on its own.

Motionworks® layers other datasets onto the Synthetic Population database to curate our Population Intelligence solutions. These include:

Conclusion: Summarizing Motionworks’ Use of Synthetic Populations for Comprehensive Location Measurement

The use of synthetic data sets is growing in popularity across multiple industry verticals. In fact, Gartner predicted in the Wall Street Journal that “By 2024, 60% of the data used for the development of AI and analytics projects will be synthetically generated.”

Motionworks® stands as a beacon of privacy-conscious measurement. Our commitment to anonymized and aggregated insights that represent the full population, coupled with the pioneering use of AI to generate synthetic populations and population intelligence reshapes the mobility data landscape.

For more information about how Motionworks® utilizes synthetic populations and how we can put our insights to work for your business, please reach out to us at [email protected].

 

Introducing Popcast™ at Home

Posted on: July 17th, 2023 by Jaclyn Giordano

Popcast at Home provides users the ability to quantify the population of Motionworks® and Custom Cohorts residing within specific geographies. 

This means you can analyze population intelligence on people living in neighborhoods across the United States and Canada. 

You will get insights into geographies and custom cohorts like: 

The Popcast at Home Product Delivers: 

Audience Activation. 

Thinking about a direct mail, local radio, or targeted OOH campaign?  Utilize Popcast data for local and regional marketing initiatives by quantifying audiences by count, as well as composition in specific geographies.  

Customer Acquisition.  

Ready to conquest competitor’s locations or scale efforts based on your best customers?  Popcastwill help you understand how many potential customers are living within a specific place, as well as where your competitors’ customers are.  

Location Planning. 

Looking to expand your franchise or retail store based on where your future customers live? Popcast quantifies the types of people who live in various areas of a region so you can optimize your real estate placement strategy, infrastructure installation, and your coordinating marketing. 

 

Popcast at Home Can Integrate with Your Data Sets: 

Motionworks can integrate first- or third-party data into our solution to identify unique audiences and scale them to the full population.  Here are a few integrations thought starters: 

Popcast at Home is Built to Help: 

Marketers: Understand your potential market in nearby postal codes to maximize your marketing budget.

Publishers: Recommend targeted inventory to your advertisers based on the residence of their ideal audience.

Agencies: Help your clients visualize where their customers live and show them how to best reach them using OOH.

Integrators: Connect the geographies of target residences to your DSP for audience targeting and plan optimization.

Retailers: Pinpoint the best location for your next store within walking distance of your customers’ homes.

 

Get Data to Answer Questions Like: 

How many people are living in Charleston, South Carolina that are in the market for an electric vehicle?

What neighborhoods in Denver should I advertise in to reach the highest number of people who drink craft beer? 

Where should I consider putting my next organic coffee shop in Florida based on where potential eco-conscious coffee drinkers live?  

What 5 markets should I buy for my national OOH campaign to reach the highest number of wealthy soccer fans?  

Three Easy Ways to Access Popcast at Home Population Intelligence: 

  1. API: Direct integration into third-party platforms.
  2. Snowflake: Download data directly.
  3. Citycast™: Motionworks® proprietary software. 

 

Ready to dive into Popcast at Home? We’re here to help. Book a demo here.

Motionworks® Launches Placecast® Trade Areas – Now Available in the Snowflake Marketplace

Posted on: July 12th, 2023 by Kym Frank

Motionworks® is excited to now provide its Placecast® Trade Areas data in the Snowflake Marketplace! This valuable dataset can answer questions such as:

 

Placecast® Trade Areas has a variety of use cases, including:

Market Analysis

Placecast® Trade Areas can determine whether targeted advertising campaigns resulted in increased foot traffic from specific neighborhoods, providing insights into the effectiveness of local marketing strategies.

Location Planning

Placecast® Trade Areas provide valuable insights into customer travel distances and identify underserved neighborhoods for optimized real estate site selection. By determining the distance customers are willing to travel to a particular location, businesses can make informed decisions about their real estate choices. Additionally, Placecast® Trade Areas help identify areas where businesses are not currently serving customers, allowing them to target those neighborhoods for potential expansion or improvement.

Foot Traffic Analytics

Placecast® Trade Areas can help visitation bureaus understand tourism patterns by providing information about the origin of visitors and any changes in their travel patterns over time.

Location Data Enrichment

Placecast® Trade Areas provides valuable information for market mix models by determining the number of local residents and visitors in a specific market throughout the year. This data helps in analyzing seasonal trends and quantifying non-resident customer opportunities.

For more information, reach out to us at [email protected] or visit us on the Snowflake Marketplace.