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I'm not sure I've ever been to a hospital with anything non-hospital related within a 100 yard radius. And you can always adjust the center of your geotargeted area to make it more effective.

In an urban setting, sure, but most hospitals I've been to are MASSIVE, sprawling facilities.

Seems like the parking lot is close enough to being in the ER anyway.

Regardless, the 'waste' will be more from targeting health care workers, janitors, visitors, etc, but the targeting will still be more effective than not doing it at all.

To expand on that, say you want to market to only people within the ER room itself because you are an attorney for personal injury.

You will most likely get everyone who’s phone was within the overall geofence +100yards or so (sometimes better sometimes worse, really depends on what and how you are measuring).

That will include everyone above and below you with good enough signal to get through. Hospitals are usually tall in urban centers, so 5-10 stories of people?

Now you have your potential list. However, the real segment you just made are hospital visitors + employees/vendors.

Maybe you can exclude those that you see a lot or on a regular cycle as staff/vendors.

You are still not very close to just “personal injury” data.

Usually, you’ll need to combine this with something more to make better segment overall and go from there.

Unfortunately, data vendors will often market the above without much cleaning as “ER visitors” or “people with health problem X”.

There are numerous threads on HN about how bad some of these segments are - people tagged with mutually exclusive segments, wrong info, etc. That’s why FB and Google, and to a lesser extent for now Amazon, are sitting on some really valuable data - we tend to tell them explicitly and/or they have fine-grained location on us.

And let’s not forget that stuff like this has spurred responses like GDPR.

The list doesn't need to be perfect - hell, it doesn't even need to be very good at all. It just needs to convert better than not using the list.

(I'm equal parts horrified and impressed that someone's actually doing this... This is why, as much as it's annoying at work, I really like the GDPR...)

True, but then again Google/FB/etc offer better access to a more targetted audience at a reasonable price.

I’d consider using something like this if I had already deployed marketing capital elsewhere and hit diminishing returns. These are more akin to gambling in my book.

Not to say that polygon-based geofencing doesn’t work. It does, but with larger, less dense locations where the lower fidelity is good enough.

> True, but then again Google/FB/etc offer better access to a more targetted audience at a reasonable price.

I'm not so sure in this specific case. If I were a (cue pejorative stereotype for emphasis) scumbag ambulance chasing lawyer - I doubt there's anything in Facebook or Google's ad targeting demographics that'd give me quite the same opportunities as a rough-and-ready demographic of "people at or close to hospital emergency departments" to try selling to...

I hope (but am prepared to be shown otherwise) than neither Facebook nor Google have an easy way to target ads to people who've just posted "Faaark! Just been in a car accident! #YOLO #GladIBoughtAVolvo #ShouldntHaveBeenTexting"

(Evil-idea: I wonder if anyone's using siome combinations of accelerometer and GPS data to detect potentially traumatic events and selling that data on?)

Tie into insurance safe driver programs that in your car... Hell tie into the car its self soon... With all the car brand API's coming out. I know it could be done with Tesla, and Mercedes....

Yeah that was my point, you're getting so many employees and unrelated devices in that tiny area. Compared to at a stand-alone box store (home depot) you'd get like 70% shoppers, but the hospital is probably on 50% patients, and few of those are in the emergency room.

> I'm not sure I've ever been to a hospital with anything non-hospital related within a 100 yard radius. And you can always adjust the center of your geotargeted area to make it more effective.

This is somewhat true of my local hospital, but the ER facility is dwarfed by the number of non-ER facilities in a 100-200 yard radius. I personally see two specialists in the facility, receive diagnostic imaging and bloodwork, plus physical therapy within that same area. I additionally drive every day through that radius as I live on the same street as my hospital.

I dont want or need these sorts of ads cropping up.

> I'm not sure I've ever been to a hospital with anything non-hospital related within a 100 yard radius. And you can always adjust the center of your geotargeted area to make it more effective.

The large local hospital in Redmond WA (Evergreen) is right next to a strip mall and shares a parking lot with a movie theater.

I had a former sales person who worked for the Berry company (who produced the Yellow Pages) tell me the two biggest buyers of listings/ads were doctors and lawyers. So not surprised lawyers may be willing to overspend a bit compared to how much those very prominent ads for lawyers were in phone books (think rear cover or side binding). I assume they still spend quite a bit on the Yellow pages since that may be all that is available to you while you sit in jail and need legal council.

Last time I was in jail there was nothing with words in my cell except my booking papers. Calls placed out of that jail were collect and didn't show a caller ID. Thankfully I got the number of a bail bondsman from a man who was in there for battery. YellowPages would have been nice.

+1 for "Last time I was in jail..."

Yeah that’s a good point. Might seem like a waste of money but it could be more effective than anything else they’ve tried.

>1. Geofencing is not very accurate. The range I’ve seen is ~100 yard accuracy. This is potentially a colossal waste of ad spend for lawyers because they get some people in the waiting room, but they also get every single device in the building, parking, and surrounding area.

Sure, but advertising is a total crap shoot anyways. How well do you think those billboards on the highway are targeted? Anything that ups your chances of getting in front of your target audience is a huge win. This is Facebook's entire business model.

That’s not really true at all. I run digital ad campaigns for a living. Pretty much everything digital (that is being run by a competent agency) is extremely targeted. You can definitely go to a site and fine poorly targeted ads, but there are legitimate business reasons for those to exist.

If built correctly I can target exactly who I want to with minimal effort. Takes some time to prune and optimize to get it there though.

2. They’re called device ids not phone ids. Proof right there the author didn’t research effectively.

Not. NPR is the mainest of mainstream news and radio-originated to boot, so their reporting is commonly simplified to an extreme degree for easy comprehension by a general audience who may well be engaged in other tasks like driving.

> This is potentially a colossal waste of ad spend for lawyers because they get some people in the waiting room, but they also get every single device in the building, parking, and surrounding area.

A 10-50% chance of successfully getting an ad in front of an active patient is tremendously higher than any other advertising method available to them, I'd suspect.

Might be. But I'd bet 3rd parties sell an audience called "in market - injury / personal lawyer" that could be closer to 100%.

Edit: found it https://i.imgur.com/QMXcYqn.png

Having seen the sort of incorrect categories Facebook slotted me into via their data broker partnerships, I wouldn't expect that to be anywhere near 100% accuracy.

I've discovered that Google, Amazon and Netflix all slot me into categories based on searches I've done and items I've looked at in the past. They don't seem to understand the difference between gag searches and a legitimate desire to buy something, which is how Amazon kept trying to sell me a 20-gallon drum of personal lubricant for so long.

Yeah I meant closer to 100%, not actually approaching that accuracy.

> Geofences are awesome for things like sports arenas, neighborhoods, malls, etc. but ineffective for anything smaller.

It's going to be tremendously effective in rural areas; the hospital closest to my parents' is the only thing within several hundred meters.

> The range I’ve seen is ~100 yard accuracy.

That's amazingly accurate, this is not for navigation purposes within the hospital but for advertising on the hospital grounds (typically a substantial multiple of 100 yards). It's not like you want to direct someone to a certain wing, though it is probably even accurate enough for that .

Besides, for many phones it is much closer than that, because location services are enabled for instance for Google (because someone used Google maps) or because some app has linked an SDK that lifts the location data from the phone and moves it to some server.

100m around a hospital is still a much smaller pond to fish from than the city as a whole.

Geo-fencing might not be terribly accurate but it gets you close. If combined with Bluetooth beacons (any chance the hospital is willing to install one for a fee?) or WiFi network recognition (I see the ER's WiFi network -- I am almost certainly inside the hospital) you can get the accuracy down to a few feet which is more than good enough for advertising company to sell that phone's position to the law firms.

Getting the right personal injury case is like hitting the lottery. Lawyers are willing to spend big on advertising to be in the right place at the right time for the right case.

It's the same as any type of advertising. As long as they produce more than they cost, it's a no brainer.

> This is potentially a colossal waste of ad spend for lawyers because they get some people in the waiting room, but they also get every single device in the building, parking, and surrounding area.

Is there a competing alternative that does any better? I wouldn't count on shady would-be advertisers to wait for perfect targeting solutions, if I were you (or else there'd be basically no advertising anywhere!).

How this likely works is the geofence is one of tens of different tactics that attempt to reach the audience who will soon need a lawyer. No way to tell unless you work for the ad agency, but from the outside this doesn't seem like an effective tactic to me.

Do you see anything else wrong with the story in the article other than perhaps the advertising might not be targeted enough?

Are you concerned that it may not be the right thing to do even if it is technically legal? I am guessing you work in adtech, I am wondering if you or your workplace has a model to address those kinds of questions?

Facebook has/had targeting option “recently in this location”, which would eliminate everyone who lives around.

https://www.facebook.com/business/a/location-targeting

Could i create a add drain, with a android emulator, registering new phones by the second via wifi in that area?

They’d get filtered out, everyone uses an anti-fraud/bot vendor.