YEDC receives report on AI data presentation at meeting

The Yoakum Economic Development Corporation heard a presentation from Placer.ai at the June 24 meeting.

“What we do is we provide visitation data to any physical place in the United States,” Placer.ai Product Specialist Chris Ribbink said. “So that includes any retailer, restaurant, shopping center, or even downtown. What Placer is going to show you is how many people visit those places and more about those visitors.”

The way Placer gets the visitation data is through the location of cell phones.

“Placer studies 30 million cell phones across the U.S. and we specifically only study the location,” Ribbink said. “We partner with hundreds of apps that people download on their iPhone or Android and when people download those apps and turn on their location services, Placer can then study the location of that phone in the background. We study places and we don’t study people. So, the only data we collect is the location of the device itself. We know nothing about the user of this device. We don’t know the name, gender, mobile ID, or even the phone number. It’s privacy first and it’s all anonymous.”

Through the app partnerships, Placer studies about 10% of the U.S. population.

“That allows us to give our four thousand customers very accurate visitation data to any place with about 90% accuracy,” Ribbink said.

This service can show the visitation of any place of business in Yoakum including H.E.B. or Circle K. It can also track visitors by coordinates such as how many people are visiting downtown.

“Placer has seven years of historical data for any venue, even if it’s not in the system yet,” Ribbink said. “So, we can look back in time and start to understand year-to-year visitation. This includes previous events.”

By tracking previous events, for example, that means data can be shown on how many people attended Tom Tom Festival.

Ribbink tested this service on the Yoakum HE-B and the data showed that this H-E-B gets about 44.3 thousand visitors per year. It also showed that the average person went to H-E-B about 18 times per year.

The service was also tested on geographic location. When highlighting downtown Yoakum, data showed that about 70 thousand people visited downtown Yoakum per year.

Placer can also show where people go after shopping at a retail center. It also tracks what time of day people visit a retail shop or downtown.

YEDC Executive Director Genora Young believes this can help market Yoakum to prospective retailers.

“This is one of the programs that could be very good for this board,” Young said. “The impact on this will have a high return on investment. We can know how many visits come downtown and it’s great information to have to market your community.”

Placer works with over 200 civic customers in Texas. The cost of this service will be around $10,000 for the year. YEDC could potentially split the cost with the city and any city official in Yoakum will have access to this service.

Other items on the agenda included:

• YEDC is still working on a date to submit a grant check to the Yoakum Independent School District Beautification Project.

• YEDC added the American Legion grant to their budget. 

• YEDC recently had their kick-off meeting with engineers from CSRS for the Industrial Park II. Surveying is currently being done and the results from that survey should come in within about two weeks. 

• YEDC recently attended a Business Retention Expansion International meeting.

• YEDC is working on content for their new website. They are reaching out to industries to see if they want their business on their website with a brief bio.

• A date for a public hearing regarding the Downtown Business District Revitalization Grant was tabled.

• A grant for the Oak Grove Cemetery in the amount not to exceed $5,000 was tabled.