With measurement top-of-mind in the Out-of-Home and Digital Out-of-Home industries, INRIX Inc. [1], Kirkland, Washington-based global provider of transportation intelligence and connected car services worldwide, formally introduced during a webinar Thursday, May 7, the first analytics platform to tap big data from the connected car for urban planning, retail site selection and advertising measurement.
[2]Through unique analysis by the company – which also has head offices in Cheshire, England, for EMEA and in Beijing for the APAC region – into the movement of people, vehicles and commerce in cities worldwide, INRIX Insights is believed to be the first platform to provide business and government with the ability to gain insight from the connected car for use in planning new roads and transit systems, locating a business or measuring the results of a marketing campaign.
The platform leverages real-time GPS data from a growing network of more than 250 million vehicles and devices.
We expect to find the new products from 10-year-old INRIX a major topic of conversation during #AmplifyOOH in San Diego next week (May 11-13, 2015), following its May 7 webinar debut.
“The Traffic Audit Bureau [3]’s mandate is to lead measurement for the US out-of-home advertising industry,” says Jeff Casper, TAB’s senior vice-president, director of operations and measurement. “We look forward to extending our relationship with INRIX, as we together bring out next generation planning and measurement insight that brings the highest level of transparency and accountability possible to the industry.”
“INRIX Insights exemplifies how the Internet of Things is transforming every aspect of business, government and society,” says Bryan Mistele, president and CEO, INRIX. “It will have an impact that extends beyond the products and services consumers use every day to how business and government design, build and ultimately measure the impact of those same products and services.”
The first two services on the INRIX Insights platform are INRIX Insights Trips and INRIX Insights Volume.
INRIX Insights Trips is a data-as-a-service (DaaS) application for understanding population movement across a metropolitan area, between two locations and at various points along the way. To develop this, there were 2.5 million trips per day analyzed (1 million in the US alone) in 34 countries from Jan. 1/14 to today. It used GPS data and other devices to analyze the data involved.
INRIX Insights Volume is the first global population movement service that provides insight into how many vehicles typically pass a location by time of day, day of week, at a location as well as actual vehicle counts on a specific day, time and side of the road. To develop this, information was compiled from trips in 40 countries.
Together, these services represent a breakthrough in Origin-Destination and vehicle count analysis that reduces cost and complexity while increasing the accuracy of data and reliability of information.
Available to customers in the U.S. and Europe, these services revolutionize how cities, businesses and advertisers anticipate movement of people and measure it across a region, around a business or past a billboard. Information tells when, where and how people travel. While vehicular traffic is currently available, other modes of travel are under consideration for the future.
For retailers, this will improve site selection and competitive intelligence. In addition to being foundational to smart cities, INRIX Insights Volume and INRIX Insights Trips services will help retailers work smarter. Key feature benefits to retailers include:
- Site selection. INRIX Insights Volume eliminates the guesswork of determining how many people pass potential store locations on a daily basis with detailed data on traffic count by time of day, day of week and side of road – an industry first;
- INRIX Insights Volume also can be used to measure the impact of marketing campaigns helping retailers understand if promotions were effective beyond store sales with immediate insight into the impact on traffic to competitors’ stores. Similarly, INRIX Insights Trips will help businesses better understand their customers and how they travel to their stores to better target advertising and promotional campaigns. For example, a retailer can use this information to understand how long it takes customers from different parts of town get to their store when deciding when and where to open a new one or pinpoint advertising and other marketing efforts to their customers on billboards, transit and other channels.
“INRIX Insight Volume and Trips really helped us better understand which of three candidate sites would have the highest return on our investment, before we laid out our money,” says Pat Augustine, Planet Fitness [4] franchisee. “No longer do retailers need to guess about the volume and origins of their prospective customers to a specific retail location.”
And Tom Blazer, CEO, eSite Analytics Inc. [5], says, “Our company serves some of the fastest growing Quick Service Restaurants in the industry. Five Guys Is a great example. We can’t afford to waste their time or run the risk of recommending poor real estate investment decisions. With the new data from INRIX Insights powering our Trip2Trade trade area creator, we can both eliminate poor candidate sites from consideration and help take the guesswork out of our site selection recommendations. INRIX Insights ensures better understanding the impact of traffic volume as an analytic data point along with demographics of prospective customers.”
The INRIX Insights platform benefits to businesses also extend to advertisers. INRIX Insights Volume takes the guesswork out of measuring the impact of the $6.9 billion billboard advertising industry. For the first time, advertisers can now understand how many people who were exposed to an ad and for how long in traffic based on time of day, day of week. With this insight, new advertisers, who demand third party measurability, can obtain the post campaign analysis they have come to expect from other advertising media.
At the government level, as governments work to address massive population growth in their cities, INRIX Insights Trips and INRIX Insights Volume provides these agencies with a more scalable, cost-effective and immediate way to predict, plan and prioritize investment in roads and transit across their entire transportation network infrastructure. Key benefits of the services include:
- Less reliance on road-side counters or automated traffic recorders. INRIX Insights Volume offers a faster, more cost-effective way to understand traffic volumes by day of week, time of day and by vehicle type (passenger vs. freight) across the entire road network;
- Faster, more reliable insight compared to costly, time intensive and often biased consumer surveys. INRIX Insights Trips uses anonymized GPS data from actual trips across a region to provide insight used to identify trends and calibrate urban planning models;
- Insight into the true movements of freight vehicles, their volumes, speeds and more, around transportation networks that enables better planning for safe and efficient movement of freight through a region. With accurate trip analysis of major roads in and out of urban areas, INRIX Insights Trips can help cities reduce congestion costs on roads and bridges for businesses, better manage flows of people in and out of events and evacuate areas faster during an emergency.
During the webinar, Rick Schuman, INRIX vice-president, and his public sector team outlined use cases, technical specifications and benefits in greater detail.