The Value of Addresses in Digital Transformation

Scott Taylor and Robert Dickson talk about the new digital economy and the value of accurate addresses with data quality expert Kartik Venkatesh. 

Blog: Location Data: Setting a Global Standard

Digital transformation remains a hot topic on the burning agenda for many global enterprise brands. My definition of digital transformation is providing value to your relationships, through your brands, at scale. All relationships need to start somewhere. If you do not start your relationship in the right place, you are not going to end up in the right place. While no one would disagree with that concept, very few companies understand the true complexity in tackling and standardizing address and location information. Without correct and dependable address information, enterprise brands put their relationship at risk: shipments don’t arrive, commitments are delayed, targeting is askew, promises are broken. So, it is critical that location data is standardized and delivered seamlessly into operational and transactional workflows.

Complexities of standardizing address data

Validating and standardizing global addresses is a lot more complex than most businesses realize. There are tremendous challenges even in highly developed geographies. “Everybody thinks since we've got the United States Postal Service, we therefore have all of the addresses, and it should be very easy” said Robert Dickson, Global leader of Loqate’s professional services team, and my co-host for ASK THE EXPERTS. “The reality is that the USPS does not deliver mail to every address in the U.S. There are certain communities that don't want the trucks in their in their yards. There are other places that can receive mail but don't receive it from the USPS.”

The dynamic nature of location information proves that something as simple as the United States, isn't that simple.

Data Quality is Hard in Emerging Markets

As we travel across the globe, things get even more difficult. It is safe to assume that every geography is going to have its own standards and nuances when it comes to location and addresses. The complexity grows exponentially in the emerging markets. “For example, in India, an address may be stated in relation to another point of interest,” said Kartik Venkatesh, CTO at Loqate. “A certain address is ‘around the corner, down the street from the cinema.’ You don't even have a standard addressing format across all the regions. This is a very hard, complex problem to solve, especially when you're trying to provide standard addresses to businesses.”

It Gets Even Worse in the Metaverse

The development of an immersive digital experience such as the Metaverse will bring new levels of challenge and complexity to the location data management space. “Real” estate is already being sold in the Metaverse. Over $500 million in Metaverse real estate was sold in 2021, and projections are double that in 2022 (1) I am about to put a bid on a few polygons across from Snoop Dogg’s NFT Museum (2).

All kidding aside, location and location data will play a vital role in the brand experience as the Metaverse becomes more mainstream. “We have some innovation efforts and R&D in this area too,” said Venkatesh. As this new world develops, validating locations and determining addresses will become even more relevant.

Forming the Loqate Standard

If, as the old saying goes, “the beauty of standards is there are so many to choose from,” how do you create a global standard across all of them? “We start with our PDH - a persistent data hierarchy,” explained Venkatesh. “We take all of our data from all the various suppliers and build this global hierarchy so that we can zoom in and zoom out from any particular address.”

This PDH standard is the backbone to the user experience, ensuring that there are rich analytics at every level of addressing. “It allows us to standardize addresses irrespective of the local and global standards that exist,” said Venkatesh. “That's why we call it the Loqate Standard, which is the highest level of addressing standards existing in the world today.”

This type of work takes an enormous amount of time and effort across an ever-changing landscape. “We have built a rich knowledge base of address standardization across the world” said Venkatesh, “but that only to takes you takes us so far.” It also takes significant investments in data science, artificial intelligence and enterprise data governance.

The task too big for most enterprises brands to manage on their own. Ironically, the more time most companies spend on managing their own location data, the further they drift from their real core competence. Just because location data is vital to your business doesn’t mean you should be in the location data business!

Find Out More

Every technologically-enabled initiative will scale or fail based on data quality. If your enterprise is working on digital transformation in any form, be sure you know where your location data is coming from.

If you’d like to dive deeper in the topic, then check out our first episode of ASK THE EXPERTS. My co-host Robert Dickson and I sit down with Loqate CTO Kartik Venkatesh to talk about his efforts to continually establish and refine a global address standard for enterprise customer and platform partners.

1 - www.thefashionlaw.com/the-un-real-estate-boom-buying-property-in-the-metaverse

2 - www.fortune.com/2022/02/02/how-to-buy-metaverse-real-estate-snoop-dogg-celebrity-neighbor