What is Hemisphere Digital?
Hemisphere Digital is a platform that provides accessible, ready-made insights on how populations move and spend at an affordable price; the people and places platform.
It is incredibly easy to use and offers dashboards and drill down reports, one-click publishing, big data discover and lightspeed data insights. It is a software as a service (SaaS) that contains reliable and accurate data relevant to understanding tourism behaviour.
The platform is available via subscription based billing and has in-built managed security as a service and a privacy preserving by design data engine, meaning you do not have the overhead, burden or risk associated with managing sensitive data. It is also highly affordable and can be accessed by any organsiation large or small.
It was developed specifically for the tourism industry to answer gaps in the data that cannot be captured from traditional market research. It is complementary to the National Visitor Survey and International Visitor survey provided by Tourism Research Australia. Hemisphere Digital won first place in the prestigious Business Research Innovation Initiative grant to answer the brief from the Australian Government; Intelligent data to transform tourism delivery.
Does it compliment the current tourism data?
Yes. We have gone through two years of Research & Development, supported by the team at Tourism Research Australia, Austrade and the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources. It has gone through significant rigorous testing to the highest level of scrutiny.
When asked what stood out about Hemisphere Digital’s grant submission that put them ahead of the pack and eventually saw them awarded the $1 million Business Research Innovation Initiative grant?
“30 organisations put forward answers to these questions and Hemisphere Digital’s proposal stood out – How they
understood the questions about what we were trying to achieve is what shone through in their proposal. It’s been a very good relationship.
Their innovative approach and sharp messaging shone through. They seemed to understand our goal quite quickly, and
their explanation had greater cut through because they understood the problem. They thought through the solution – as
opposed to selling us something off the shelf, which was missing the point altogether!
They actually looked at our issue and thought it through and came up with a proposal that they thought would work.
Because it was so technically in depth, shone through and passion for tourism. Made their proposition compelling.”
Does mobility data accurately measure visitor behaviour?
Hemisphere Digital’s mobility data is the most accurate and representative sample, available in the market today. Different mobility data providers have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are more expensive and harder to use than others, whereas some suffer from inherent biases in the way the data is captured. Our data represents the highest balance between value, accuracy and usefulness. But if you want to use your own mobility data provider, That’s not a problem, in fact we have been working with major mobility data sets since early 2019.
Annie Parsons, Board member for Australian leading digital outdoor media company QMS has seen the transformation
change that mobility data has had to the digital out of home industry. “Through our partnership with mobility data and intelligence provider and audience modeling specialists Hemisphere Digital, we are now able to collect and process billions of anonymised and aggregated mobile network data points from a third of the Australian population. With massively enhanced data sets, we will enable advertisers to capture audience data better than ever before, using a research lens that allows a clear view of audience dynamism.”
What about tourism expenditure?
There are lots of sources of expenditure. Some are tricky to work with due to their market maturity and suffer from significant biases in regional areas. We have been working with financial data for many years, including one of Australia’s big 4 banks, their technology partners and more recently with global payments technology company Visa.
We have chosen to work with Visa, the world leader in digital payments, which has strong and longstanding association with the travel industry. Visa has over 70 million merchant acceptance locations worldwide in over 200 markets.
Visa’s transaction data captures domestic and international spend in Australia, providing insights into tourism behaviour and the impact of tourism spend on the economy. The insights derived from Visa transaction data are actionable and will be critical for understanding and supporting tourism recovery as restrictions lift and travel returns.
Is the Hemisphere Digital platform easy to use?
Yes, absolutely. It’s been designed to be very easy to use for both technical and non-technical users. You don’t have to worry about any compliance issues, risk, privacy preserving treatment of data or any of those complex and technical challenges when dealing with huge data sets, which would make building your own solution incredibly expensive and time consuming.
You get to use one click publishing tools which reduce the time to access insights from up to 25 days down to less than three seconds. And if you want, you can republish this and make it your own brand and add your own flavour. Our customer support team will work with you in partnership to ensure you get the most value out of the system and data insights and can configure the platform to exactly how you want to use it.
What if I want more than mobility and expenditure data?
Not a problem. We have access to many, many different data providers, from accommodation listings, reviews and sentiment to detailed stats on accommodation bookings, and a whole range of different levels of granularity and time periods. If you’re a super user and you want to analyse your own data sets, that’s not a problem either.
We offer everything from one click publishing, data automation, extensive data visualisation and deep dive analytics through a consistent set of standards that can be applied to virtually any data source. Our highly secure and scalable cloud platform gives you super-fast access to most data in the market available today without the headaches of worrying about compliance, privacy risk and maintaining your own big data service.
Chris Jagger, Managing Partner of Ampliphi Ventures who led Hemisphere’s recent fundraising round, commented, “Having invested in a number of geospatial and cloud/edge software solutions across the USA and Australasia, we were really impressed by what Mike and the team have developed with Hemisphere Digital.”
“It is a ground-breaking platform that has relevance not only for the tourism industry globally, but also other industries that need better, faster and more actionable customer and market insights. Of critical importance, Hemisphere has solved the use of data in a privacy-compliant manner.”
Hemisphere Digital is relatively new, what about your experience?
We’ve been around since 2015, but collectively we have over 100 years of experience in leading cutting edge data projects and our data science team fit the highest levels of credentials in the data industry. We are members of the Research Society, Australian Association of Social Marketing and the Australian Data and Insights Association and have been working with large scale data research projects for many years. We’re highly skilled and ethical practitioners of data and technology. Our critical understanding of the challenges that businesses face with data, together with our clear sense of ethics and belief in data-driven social outcomes make us a stand-out next generation data and technology business. Don’t just take our word for it.
Christian Zavecz – QMS Chief Strategy Officer used the live audience measurement platform developed by Hemisphere digital in 2019 to full use during the first Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020 and was able to retain critical revenue and market share in an otherwise disastrous time in the digital out of home industry.
“We were fortunate to have just launched our intelligent data and insights platform when COVID hit, and the fact that it is powered by mobility data enabled us to transparently report real time audience numbers for our digital billboards on a weekly basis. What the data showed us was that whilst people were moving less often, they were still moving; and more critically being able to delve further into the how, where, when and why gave us a more in depth understanding of these audience changes. The robust and granular data enabled us to successfully optimise site selection based on the real-time environment and implement an audience guarantee initiative that ensured our clients’ campaigns continued to deliver audiences equivalent to what they were at the same time last year.”
We are now applying that same approach to our recent win of the City of Sydney street furniture contract, previously held for 20 years by JCDecaux. Accurate, real-time audience measurement through Hemisphere Digital allows for the first time, the City of Sydney to fully capitalise on its data assets and provide premium revenue streams in a industry that has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
What makes Hemisphere different? We’re more than just a data platform.
Besides being a highly innovative data platform, we’re a home-grown Australian business with a social purpose. We like to give back to our communities. In a world where there is greater dependency on global tech giants, we feel that we are actively contributing back to Australian jobs and the growing technology sector. We employ and support STEM through our grad programme and we passionately support sustainable tourism development goals. We subscribe to the interrelated quadruple bottom line of 4P’s: people, profit, planet, and progress – which we believe provides the basis for a more comprehensive framework for developing measures of sustainable prosperity. – Cambridge Leadership Development.
We are also in the process of establishing a social enterprise and giveback fund through biodiversity credits and carbon offsetting. We are currently working with indigenous groups, small businesses and government and want to ensure that they all have access to fair, transparent data for the good of the tourism industry in a timely and consistent way, when the industry needs it most.
Integral to Hemisphere Digital’s motivation and culture is investing our time, talent and resources to understand in detail the matrix of data and apply that knowledge to sustainable ecosystems and cultural diversity as fundamental to sustainable prosperity. We clearly understand the impact mass tourism has, is, and will have on the planet and people and our mission actively contributes to raising awareness and taking action.
Our mission is to use profits from its analytics capabilities to support sustainable tourism and outdoor recreation ventures to preserve our natural areas. To this end we actively support minimal impact education and work with first nations people through the Leave No Trace™ global program and our emerging social enterprise, Wejugo.
This sounds great, but is it going to be expensive?
We’ve removed the technical complexities around accessing and generating insights. And that means for you, you get access to high quality, high impact tourism benchmarking data at an incredibly affordable price, that reflects the size of your organisation.
We offer flexible pricing plans where you pay only for what you use and offer a monthly subscription service that reduces the need for large, up-front commitments. Our plans range from an essentials package designed for small businesses, to enterprise deals where you have complete flexibility over which data you subscribe to and who can access and analyse data. For a limited time also, we are offering subsidised access packages for eligible entities in the tourism industry affected by the COVID-19 or recent bushfires and floods.
How do I find out more information, can I get a trial?
Our customer engagement team would love to hear from you. You can email us at sales@hemisphere.digital or reach out via our linkedin page https://www.linkedin.com/company/hemisphere-digital/
We are currently offering limited time introductory offers and trials at discounted rates to help out our tourism partners. If you are a tourism operator or related entity in the tourism industry, you maybe eligible for a discount. To find out please visit https://hemisphere.digital/tourism-recovery to enquire.