Lucia Moses

As a marketer, you’ve mastered location-based marketing. But what if your target consumers aren’t where they claim to be? Social ad platform 140 Proof, which uses people’s public social network activities such as their location, what they share and who they follow to target them with ads, did some research on the difference between people’s stated locations and their actual ones.

Guess what? People aren’t always where they say they are. In a concept it’s dubbed “geographic drift,” in major cities like New York and Los Angeles, there are many people who self-identify as being from those cities who actually live in a broad area around them.

140 Proof has some theories about why this is. Some have to do with convenience (New York is more recognizable than Bridgeport; commuting makes drift possible). But there’s also an aspirational, or vanity, factor. “People like to be seen in certain areas or neighborhoods,” said John Manoogian III, CTO of 140 Proof. “They’re not necessarily advertising they’re from Walnut Creek.”

There’s no standard way for marketers to evaluate where people are, though, because people can self-report their whereabouts on social networks but they also can be located automatically by things like browser-based location tagging and IP address.