DefinitionPostal code targeting selects an audience at postal-code level rather than by city, region or country. It is the finest geographic unit most media channels can actually be bought against.
What the resolution looks like
- Germany: roughly 8,200 five-digit postal codes; one typically covers a district or a few villages.
- United States: roughly 41,000 ZIP codes, which are mail routes rather than areas.
- United Kingdom: postcode sectors and units go finer still, down to a handful of addresses.
Where it is worth the effort
- Physical catchments: a store, branch or venue draws from a defined area.
- Direct mail and door drops: bought by postal code by definition.
- Out-of-home: placement is a point on a map.
- Test and control design: matched sets of postal codes make clean regional experiments possible.
- Sponsorship geography: whether a property’s audience sits inside a sponsor’s distribution footprint.
Plan fine, buy at the level you can
Plan at postal-code resolution, then aggregate to the smallest unit the chosen channel can buy. The resolution still informs the decision where it cannot be executed directly.
Common mistakes
- Postal codes are administrative. They were drawn for delivering mail. A real catchment often spans several and splits one.
- US ZIP codes are routes. Treating them as areas adds error; a ZIP can be one building or hundreds of square kilometres.
- Small units, small numbers. Estimates rest on fewer observations. Aggregating neighbouring codes is often more honest.
- Not every channel can buy it. A postal-code plan no channel can execute is an analysis, not a plan.
How Rascasse uses it
Rascasse resolves audiences down to postal code where available, with up to 10,000 data points per postal code. The values describe interest in a specific brand, club, artist or topic, not the general structure of an area, so they add a demand layer to classical purchasing-power data.
Related use cases: Local Targeting & OOH, Location Planning, Ticket Sales.
Related terms
GeomarketingGeomarketing is the practice of making marketing and location decisions on the basis of geographic data: where customers are, where they are not, and what distinguishes one area from the next.Catchment areaA catchment area is the geographic zone from which a location, such as a store, venue, stadium or branch, actually draws its visitors.Regional affinityRegional affinity shows where inside a country an audience is concentrated, measured against each region’s share of the population.