Florence Broderick • Mar 22, 2019

Supercharging your Site Selection: CARTO Reveal's latest release

Today we announce the latest release of our Reveal solution, an application for Retailers and Real Estate firms to drive smarter location decisions for their site footprints.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen many different types of organizations using our platform in different ways, ranging from logistics optimization, to sales territory management or even geomarketing. However, one of the most common applications of Location Intelligence across CARTO has been Site Planning and Monitoring, with a growing number of Retail and Real Estate firms turning to geospatial analytics and data to make smarter decisions on where to expand, close or consolidate.

Across the industry, some have called it the “retail apocalypse”, but the data shows that so far in 2019, US retailers have announced some 1,674 store closures and 1,380 store openings - confirming a clear shift in the Retail ecosystem, rather than a total demise. Whether it’s the pressure to compete with e-commerce giants or consumer demand for a better omnichannel experience - the number of business decisions requiring additional spatial context continues to grow.

We’ve also noticed that different stakeholders in these decisions have a wide range of requirements:

• Expansion Managers are increasingly interested in using more third party data streams (such as Mastercard transaction data or Vodafone foot traffic data) - but don't have the time to speak to a wide range of vendors to evaluate their data in the context of their Site Selection challenge.
• Data Science teams are typically small and under resourced with limited experience working with spatial data. To save time they appreciate having access to productized analyses and consistently aggregated data streams, but they still want the flexibility of an LI platform rather than a rigid pre-packaged Site Planning solution.
• Executive decision makers have commented that their GIS and BI teams are often small, and can become a bottleneck. They need faster access to location insight through PDF reports from their Location Intelligence solutions.

All of this feedback inspired us to take our Reveal solution to the next level, improving the user experience to provide faster and higher quality insights across organizations that want to become more spatially savvy, whilst at the same time using new platform developments such as CARTO VL and Airship to the maximum.

Already used by clients such as Globalia and Vodafone, Reveal allows organizations to bring together their internal data on store performance with external always-on data streams, such as human mobility, transaction data and real estate metrics.

About the author

Flo is VP Marketing at CARTO, leading our Demand Generation, Content, Product Marketing and SDR teams to translate the value of Location Intelligence to existing and prospective clients, generating demand for spatial analysis use cases on our platform. Prior to joining CARTO, Flo was Global Head of Marketing and Communications for LUCA, Telefónica's specialist Big Data unit, having been fast tracked into management after completing the Global Graduate Programme working in sales and marketing rotations in Connected Car, VOIP tech, and mobile data insights in the UK, Spain, Germany, and Latin America.

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