Uber wants to sell more travel data to advertisers

Uber is making a massive investment in advertising dollars by launching a new insights platform, Uber Intelligence. This is designed to sell aggregated data about where you’re traveling and what you’re ordering takeout directly to marketers.

The ride-hailing giant has excellent data that will tell advertisers how to improve the performance of their campaigns, thanks to its incredibly detailed insights into consumer behavior. Uber Intelligence will enable marketers to securely combine their existing customer data with Uber’s travel and restaurant data to gain deep insights into their target audiences.

To ensure privacy security, Uber has partnered with data connectivity platform LiveRamp. The company uses LiveRamp’s “clean room technology,” which is essentially a secure environment that aggregates data without ever sharing raw or personally identifiable customer information. This is a crucial distinction, especially since Uber collects very sensitive location data.

Vihan Sharma, LiveRamp’s chief revenue officer, highlighted that the platform offers technical safeguards to ensure “zero data movement”, which should make things much more secure and prevent advertisers from obtaining too much information.

It’s no surprise that the data Uber Intelligence provides is incredibly valuable. While this may seem specific to you, there are ways to make good use of this data. For example, a hotel brand could use the platform to identify specific restaurants or entertainment venues that frequent business travelers regularly frequent. These hotels could then use this information to develop partnership opportunities for their loyalty programs.

Still, I can’t help but be skeptical that this won’t target the individual. For example, Uber hopes this platform will be useful to its broader advertising division. Once marketers use the clean room for segmentation, they can immediately turn around and target these specific groups with ads in the Uber app or on car screens.

For example, the system could isolate frequent travelers and serve them specific advertisements during their journey to the terminal. We know this happens with most data sales. While this doesn’t mean that advertisers know they’re targeting John Smith, they do know that these ads are being served to people who travel frequently.

I don’t think the increased revenue from selling our data will translate into cheaper rides in the future. Uber is focused on hitting its $1.5 billion ad revenue goal. So the company is unlikely to cut profits from other divisions or cut prices.

The company is known for raising costs; Uber has increased its prices by about 18% per year since 2018, which is a rate well above inflation. As a former Uber driver, I can attest that these fare hikes are rarely reflected in the driver’s salary.

There are many reasons to be concerned when it comes to the sale of data. This would give advertisers insight into what you buy, when you prefer to visit a store rather than have something delivered, and much more data. For those who are already fed up with companies wanting to know everything about you and where you’re going, this is a major frustration.

Source: Business Insider