Helping marketing campaigns go viral

Project Information

Demographica

Grant agreement ID: 789839

DOI

10.3030/789839

Project closed

EC signature date 29 November 2017

Start date 1 December 2017

End date 31 March 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

STHAR SA
Switzerland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Demographica (Helping marketing campaigns go viral)

Reporting period: 2017-12-01 to 2018-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

SThAR is a spin-off from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL (Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne) that develops theoretical concepts for managing street actions related to marketing campaigns, fund raising, or tourism based on socio-thermodynamic principles. We lead this game-changing approach and have published a great number of papers in technological (fast company, technological review) and scientific webs (NAUKAS, EPFL news, MEDIACOM), and general media (e.g. El País, La Vanguardia).
SThAR is bringing to market DEMOGRAPHICA: a simple and didactic platform that analyses complex, massive, anonymous data (i.e. Call Detail Records -CDR-) provided by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to forecast population mobility patterns. Our analytics platform helps marketers anonymously characterize and segment users, clients or attendees for a myriad of vertical markets, e.g. out-of-home marketing, transportation, logistics, tourism, events.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During this feasibility study we could validate all dimensions of our business idea.
-From a technical perspective, we could produce the final architecture of the solution and determined all systems needed to exploit the business while ensuring a swift scalability.
-From a commercial perspective, we unveiled new lucrative business opportunities. At the beginning we were focused on producing a full set of applications and analytical services for, primarily, the OOH Marketing sector. This market was confirmed and we could engage with market leaders such as PosterScope and Cuende. However, during the feasibility we unveiled a very lucrative opportunity from the provision of mobility patterns and analytics to also attend the needs of the Transportation/Logistics/Smart-cities mobility sector and of the Tourism/Events sector. On these new unveiled markets we also could engage with relevant early adopters that are already testing our technology on pilot projects (e.g. Fuengirola Municipality, CINTRA).
-From a financial perspective, we could carry out 4-years worst-case (RoI: 1.8 Ret.Earnings: ~€7M) and realistic (RoI: 3.65 , Ret.Earnings: ~€11.6M) trading projections. In both scenarios the business idea was validated. Moreover, these scenarios are based on bottom-up projections built upon the conversations maintained with key early-adopters on the targeted markets (e.g. Neinver, Ikea, Roadis, Seat, Cuende, Posterscope, Cintra, Jazztel, Enel, among others).
-From a business perspective, we could further engage with MNOs to monetise their data (Orange onboard, advanced negotiations with SWISSCOM, and promising conversations with many others in Europe, MENA and LATAM). We also could produce a thorough work-plan that will be executed during the upcoming Phase-2 of DEMOGRAPHICA considering all risks identified on previous tasks. Finally, we could engage and meet with several BA networks and VC firms that told us that in order to invest on our project, a new company had to be created, as SThAR statutes required 100% agreement of shareholders to take any decision. Our coach confirmed this would be convenient, so the process to transfer all employees, IPs and current agreements is ongoing (to be finalised by May-June 2017). Indeed, this new company, KIDO-DYNAMICS, will be the one carrying out the Phase-2 of DEMOGRAPHICA.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Novelty of DEMOGRAPHICA relies on applying to marketing the physical laws and algorithms that previously were developed for cities growth, as laws working in one field can often apply to a very different one. Thus, the use of Big Data and physics-based models for ranking public locations according to crowdedness, behavioural segmentation and “virality” potential for improving decision taking and marketing actions in a variety of sectors such as Tourism, Events, OOH Marketing, Transportation or Smart-Cities Mobility, among others. Moreover, we achieve all these goals fully complying with the most restrictive privacy regulations (i.e. EU’s GDPR), as we only need aggregated data and our algorithms do not rely on any kind of personal / private data from any citizen.
However, the usefulness of our platform goes far beyond. Currently part of our future lines is the application of our fully proprietary algorithms and software to other fields were decision taking depends on the analysis of population mobility, such as optimising evacuation management, determining patient-zero location on diseases propagation, optimising energy distribution, determining the right strategy to optimise border control and many others: our journey has just begun.

Project Logo

Current company (SThAR) logo

Future company (KIDO DYNAMICS) logo