• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, October 7, 2013

Semcasting, an audience targeting platform that uses IP addresses instead of cookies, this morning announced the general availability of their cloud-based platform, Semcasting Marketing Appliance. Previously, Semcasting's targeting services were available only to Semcasting partners.

Ray Kingman, the company's CEO, spoke with RTM Daily about the announcement. He said the platform is unique because it uses Smart Zones, a patent pending technology that he described as a "virtual map…of all the Internet delivery points in the U.S." He claimed that Smart Zones is about 600 times "more granular than a zip code" and about three-quarters as granular as ZIP+4s.

The platform also supports consumer privacy protection through compliance with Do Not Track and adherence with FTC recommendations. Kingman shared how the Smart Zones technology was designed around a legal precedent from the Fair Credit Reporting Act passed in 1970 to protect consumer privacy.

He said the Fair Credit Reporting Act did not allow marketers to "use credit data for marketing purposes unless [they could] automatically grant [consumers] credit. But if you average the value of the ZIP+4s, then you could use it for marketing data. It protected their privacy, their credit score, and gave a bullet-proof shield for the one-to-many marketer," he said "That is essentially what we are trying to deploy here."

Smart Zones emulates the precedent because it averages data from the IP addresses of a certain area to give general demographic or "firmographic" information. Kingman said the Smart Zones typically have anywhere between 16 to 256 IP addresses in them. Those zones create what Semcasting calls "targetable demographics" -- a.k.a. the 'Smart Zone' -- by giving marketers a read on a neighborhood, street, small area of a town, etc.

The general availability of the platform does not change any existing Semcasting partnerships.