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Release Notes May 4, 2020
The Mapping Centre, Trade Areas, POIs, sharing custom reports, and Data Mining saw a number of improvements this release. In the Mapping Centre, you can now save a picture of your map as a PNG through our new download map feature! When creating trade areas, you can now use latitude and longitude instead of postal code to define the centre or other points! All of your customized reports can now be shared with Polaris users in your group with the click of a button! […]

COVID-19 Hotspots: Finding high risk populations using Polaris
COVID-19 is quickly spreading and impacting an alarming number of people that come from different walks of life. The demographics of confirmed cases indicate that some groups are much more vulnerable to the virus than others. How can we find the communities which are most at risk? Is the distribution of the most vulnerable groups to COVID-19 geographically even? We use Polaris to tackle these questions. […]

Release Notes Apr 13, 2020
Our latest release includes a little bit of everything! New features, new data, faster performance, and bug fixes. New ways to define Trade Areas. Users can now define trade areas by uploading a list of FSAs (first 3 digits of the postal code). To take advantage of this feature, upload a Trade Area File as a Point-Based Trade Area and select Forward Sortation Area (FSA) as the Geography Level. New Reports! We’ve added a couple new selections for report types: Household Spending by Major Group, Labour Force […]

Insight, Plain Sight, Out of Sight
We invited a sophisticated, well-esteemed partner, Longo’s, to share their experiences at the Conference on Big Data and Information Analytics at the Fields Institute at the University of Toronto. Longo’s is an independent, family-owned grocer with many locations across Ontario that has long known the value of data for growing their business. As a grocery retailer in a highly competitive field, they rely on effective data analytics to increase their understanding of their customer’s needs […]

Release Notes Feb 25, 2020
We added a lot of new functionality this release, connecting the Data Mining module to the rest of Polaris, connecting Targeting directly to the rest of Polaris, and adding Point-Based Trade Areas. We added a new type of trade area called “Point-Based”. These trade areas are defined by a single or a group of postal codes. These “Point-Based” trade areas can be combined with each other in the same way that typical trade areas can be, which enables a new level of precision to Trade Area Analysis! […]

FT: Outdoor Advertising Spending Surpassing Newspaper Ad Sales Globally in 2020
As reported by the Financial Times [paywall], spending on out-of-home advertising is the only traditional media that continues to grow while others are declining and being replaced by online advertising.
What is out of home? Out of home refers to billboards, outdoor posters, street furniture (e.g. bus stops), airports, truck ads, and restrooms. Outdoor advertising as a category has grown […]

Why do so many corporations use Canada as a test market?
As McDonald’s starts selling Beyond Meat sandwiches in Canada, we are reminded of all the ways that Canada, and in particular, markets like London Ontario, serves as a test market for global corporations. In recent years, Ikea’s pick-up warehouses, Lululemon’s loyalty program, Facebook Dating, Twitter modifications, and in the early 2000s, McDonald’s Chicken Nugget and Swiffer’s Wet Jet, have all been tested in Canada before being […]

Last Chance for Retail Conference Early-Bird Tickets
DX3 is Canada’s biggest retail, marketing, and technology event. 2020’s conference will be held on March 10 and 11 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. We will be exhibiting at booth #115, and we hope to see you there! They will be extending early-bird pricing by 1 week. DX3 is also providing 25 free Full-Access tickets to charities! Send them an email at info@dx3canada.com […]

Release Notes Jan 20, 2020
In the latest release, we added functionality to the Data Mining module, improved stability across the platform, and enhanced the ability to save and load maps. We created a simple Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. We connected the Data Mining module to the Polaris database, which means users can now save files on the cloud and work on them later. We enhanced the stability and performance of the Map Layers tab. We added tabs to the Data Mining module to make it a little more user-friendly. […]

How Does a Store Choose Where to Open a New Location?
It’s not easy to choose where to open a new retail location, let alone a new supermarket. This article from the Toronto Star covers the closing of T & T’s Cherry Street location as well as some considerations retailers, especially sophisticated retailers like Longo’s, make when they evaluate new locations. Polaris Intelligence is perfect for this kind of use case. Strategists can use Polaris to evaluate neighbourhood demographics […]

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