Back in 2019, when profitability was still a dream for Uber, some anonymous source leaked to Reuters that the company was working on an alternative revenue stream that might get it over the top. The core business of selling people rides wasn’t going to do it, but perhaps by exploiting what this anonymous source called a “wildly successful data collection on who uses it and how they use it and where they go,” the company, “can become profitable.”
The company started selling location data to advertisers in 2022 according to VICE, and became profitable in 2023. Now it’s going deeper with your data.
With the launch of a new program called Uber Intelligence, Uber is getting into the nitty gritty behavioral patterns of its users. With this service, marketers can now combine their own cache of information about people with their Uber ride and delivery data, Business Insider reported. The system was built in partnership with a software-as-a-service company called LiveRamp that makes offline data usable for advertisers.
As noted by Business Insider, Uber Intelligence uses something LiveRamp’s calls its “clean room.” According to the LiveRamp website, a clean room is a cloud-based digital warehouse and workshop of sorts where data is elegantly combined and stored in a form that is usable and, (apparently) meets industry standards for user privacy. In the case of Uber, this means advertisers who access this data will not just know where a person has been, but insights like what they eat, and how often they move through, say, a given neighborhood or district in a city.
Uber apparently gave Business Insider the example of a hotel chain. With access to Uber users’ data at such granular levels, a hotel company could identify key businesses like restaurants or nearby venues that could be roped into a loyalty program.
Marketers who advertise in the Uber app itself, or on screens inside Uber vehicles, can also benefit from having users divided into exploitable categories—for instance, Insider says, if your job involves a lot of business travel, your ad experience might be catered on that basis. “That seamlessness is why we’re so excited,” Edwin Wong, whose job title is “global head of measurement” for Uber Advertising told Business Insider.
Wong was hired in May, at which point Uber was projecting $1.5 billion in revenue from ads annually, an apparent 60% increase from the same point in 2024 according to Digiday. Digiday wrote at the time that Wong’s job would be to “analyze performance insights while working with measurement partners, advertisers, and Uber’s marketing team.” This would seem to be the fruit of such a project.
In Business Insider’s article, business analyst Andrew Frank of the firm Gartner referred to Uber’s unique geographic edge over competing data-selling tech companies like Amazon and Google “terrestrial data,” as in: where on Earth you are, and go, and what you do there. But, Frank noted, Uber might have concerns down the line about trust, and eventual regulation in this area.
Translation: People and elected officials might not like “Uber Intelligence,” and even at least one business analyst thinks Uber had better tread lightly.
Read the full article here
