Location Data Buyers_Guide

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UNDERSTANDING
THINKNEAR'S MOBILE
LOCATION DATA

OVERVIEW 1

In July 2014, the IAB released a framework to help media buyers ask the right questions about location
data and accuracy. Location has become a key tool for mobile marketers, but as with any new technology,
industry standards and practices are still evolving.

Location is enabling better targeting and driving better consumer experiences, but data accuracy is the
key to ensuring further growth in the industry. Thinknear has worked to bring transparency to location data
and launched the Location Score Index to benchmark industry accuracy in 2014. In this paper, Thinknear
addresses each of the IAB recommended questions for buyers, providing a better understanding of
Thinknear’s location data and how it is used in mobile advertising campaigns.

Read IAB's 12 Questions Every Buyer Should Ask about Location Data.

WHEN ACCURATE LOCATION
DATA MATTERS

Location provides a wealth of information about mobile users and can be used to target very specific audi-
ences based on their location and behaviors. These audience traits can vary significantly over short dis-
tances, which means location data must be highly accurate to effectively reach the target audience.

Proximity-Based Targeting: Targeting mobile users in close proximity to a brick-and-mortar location is
a core tactic for retailers, auto dealers, large restaurant chains and marketers wanting to conquest
the competition's customers. Accurate location is critical in ensuring impressions are not wasted on
users outside the addressable markets.

Location-Based Audience Targeting: Location enables the targeting of specific audiences that brands
would otherwise struggle to reach on mobile. Audience traits such as ethnicity, household income,
family size, life stage and others can vary dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood, making
it critical to deploy accurate location data when targeting audiences on mobile.

National and DMA-Level Campaigns: Traditional brand advertisers often leverage DMA or even
"national" campaigns. But even wide-area campaigns benefit from location accuracy. For DMA-level
campaigns, accurate location data ensures that mobile ads are delivered in the right DMA and that
creative is localized effectively. For national campaigns, location allows advertisers to deploy large-
scale campaigns targeting specific audiences in each local market.

Behavioral Targeting: Targeting mobile users based on the places they frequently visit is a key trend
in mobile. However, if a marketer wants to reach users who shop at Walmart, Macy's or Safeway, the
location date used to create the user profiles must be highly accurate. Poor location data can render
user profiles worthless and prevents location-based retargeting from being effective.

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PLACE DATA

What is the source of your "place" information? Thinknear leverages first-party place data from our parent
company, Telenav. Telenav builds navigation and location-based services for Sprint, AT&T and three of the
top five auto manufacturers in the U.S. Business merchant listings and other place data are pooled from a
number of sources including YP/ATTi, ESRI, proprietary web crawlers and data supplied by Telenav clients.
Each listing is evaluated and cleansed to ensure quality and accuracy.

What is your overall share of 1st versus 3rd party place data? Thinknear has exclusive access to Telenav’s
place-based data set. Where necessary, that data can be augmented by client data or commercially avail-
able place-based data sets. The percentage of 1st versus 3rd party data varies by campaign and is depen-
dent on the overall targeting needs for each specific client. Proximity-based geofence targeting may
leverage a small amount of 3rd party data, while an audience targeting strategy based on past purchase
behavior may require a large amount of 3rd party data.

What is your approach to organizing places/place data? Thinknear organizes place data using a taxonomy of
geo-spatial tiles. In this system, the entire country is broken into 100 meter x 100 meter tiles, on which
we overlay place information as well as a variety of other data sets.

The tile approach is a flexible system that allows us to effectively deploy both geo-fence (radius based) and
non-standard polygon targeting approaches, depending on the needs of the campaign.

How precise is your place information? Place information precision varies across place sources (for street
addresses) and geocoders (for latitude/longitude mapping). In some cases we have latitudes/longitudes
that represent the street address and in others we have rooftop latitudes/longitudes. We aim to predomi-
nantly use higher precision geocoded latitude/longitudes for better targeting and profile-building purposes.

How comprehensive is your place information? As a division of Telenav, we have access to one of the largest
and highest quality data sets in the mobile industry. In addition to Thinknear, Telenav’s location services
power navigation and place-based search functionality for Sprint, AT&T and three of the top five auto man-
ufacturers. This gives us access to over 18.5 million business merchant listings and points of interest.

How do you qualify and/or verify your place information? Every single point-of-interest is scrubbed to maintain
accuracy. Thinknear's advertising products and Telenav's consumer navigation apps each depend on accu-
rate place information to deliver seamless user experiences.

a. How do you compensate for bad addresses? Thinknear leverages Telenav’s navigation business to
develop a constant feedback loop to monitor place listings. Telenav’s navigation apps, including Scout
and AT&T Navigator, allow users to provide real-time feedback on place-based data. This crowd-sourced
feedback loop allows Telenav’s place data to be quickly verified.

b. Do you have a way to account for recent openings and closings of locations? As mentioned above,
Thinknear leverages Telenav’s crowd-sourced feedback loop to maintain the quality of place-based
information. Thinknear also works with vendors and brands to receive regular place data refreshes and
uses web crawlers to verify any store opening or closure metadata.

2

DEVICE DATA

What are the sources of device location data and how do you receive that data? Thinknear works with pro-
grammatic supply sources to receive location data for each impression opportunity. Thinknear's proprietary
Location Score technology is used to evaluate the data we receive and ensure we are purchasing accurate
impression data. For more information, please visit LocationScore.com.

What types of device location data do you use? Thinknear uses the primary types of device location data -
device GPS, Cell Tower Triangulation and Wi-Fi Triangulation. Our Location Scoring methods allow us to
score and filter inaccurate location data from each impression (found in user-reported location data, local
content and centroids). Every impression from our supply sources is scored and evaluated to ensure loca-
tion accuracy.

How do you identify and filter out the types of targetable location data that are not appropriately accurate for
my campaign's needs? With Location Score, we are evaluating the accuracy of the location data associ-
ated with ad requests. Location accuracy is a measure of the proximity of the user's stated location per the
ad request versus the user's true location in real life. If the location associated with an ad request accu-
rately represents the mobile user's true location, the impression will be scored with a high Location Score.
Inaccurate data will receive a low Location Score.

Our data science team leverages an in-house predictive model to score every single impression consid-
ered for purchase. We sample and analyze data from over a billion programmatic ad impressions and run
location accuracy tests on close to 500,000 consumer ad experiences every quarter to validate our model.
With this technology, we score all impressions when we buy them to ensure accurate location targeting in
each of our campaigns.

How long is your location data stored/considered relevant? Because location data changes frequently,
Thinknear makes sure that location data stores are continuously updated to maintain relevancy.

Is your device data time-stamped? Thinknear’s ad opportunity device data is time-stamped. We update our
user place data continuously since we generally consider most place-based user profile data to be stale
after two months.

How do you verify/substantiate that the device location data you are using is accurate? Please see our methods
on identifying and filtering out the types of targetable location data outlined above.

What is the scale of your device location data? Thinknear has access to over 150 billion location-tagged
impression opportunities each month, one of the largest location-enabled inventory sets in mobile.

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CONCLUSION

The mobile advertising space is evolving quickly and technologies are constantly changing. Location will
continue to play a larger and more prominent role in helping brands and consumers connect over mobile.
Thinknear's Location Score platform delivers the highest possible data quality in mobile, ensuring brands
get the audience they paid to reach. By prioritizing location data accuracy and bringing a quality bench-
marking tool to market, Thinknear seeks to arm media buyers with the tools necessary to engage with the
targeted audience at the right place and at the right time.

Download our Location Score Index for industry insights and more information about location data
accuracy.

ABOUT THINKNEAR

Thinknear is a location technology company and full-service mobile advertising network focused on deliver-
ing amazing advertising campaigns for agencies, brands and consumers. Thinknear’s platform delivers the
accuracy, scale and technology required to effectively leverage mobile location data to power better con-
sumer experiences. In mobile, accuracy matters, and as a division of Telenav, Thinknear leverages exclu-
sive access to over 15 years of proprietary location data. To learn more, please visit www.thinknear.com
and follow @thinknear on Twitter.

Copyright © 2014 Thinknear by Telenav. twitter @Thinknear 4