What Is the Difference Between Borrell's Compass and Local Scope?

Updated

Borrell Associates offers two distinct local-market data products, and the right one depends on whether you need to understand advertising spending or customer demographics. Compass tracks and forecasts what businesses spend on advertising and marketing across U.S. geographies. Local Scope profiles the customers of a local business using cellphone activity data. If your question is "how much is being spent in this market?", you want Compass. If your question is "who are this business's customers?", you want Local Scope.

Compass: Advertising Spend Tracking and Forecasting

Compass is Borrell's spending-intelligence product. Per the site, it covers more than 20 million U.S. businesses and is customizable along three dimensions:

  • Geography — configurable down to the county level
  • Business type — 100 types of businesses
  • Expenditure type — dozens of media and marketing categories, including event sponsorships, promotional items, and printed materials alongside traditional media

It provides both tracking and forecasting, so it serves directional planning questions: how a market's ad spend is trending, where it's headed, and how spend breaks down by business category.

Choose Compass when you need to:

  • Size advertising and marketing spend in a specific market or county
  • Compare spend patterns across business categories
  • Build a forecast or budget case grounded in market-level spending data

Local Scope: Customer Profiling from Cellphone Activity

Local Scope answers a different question. It delivers demographic profiles for the customers of any local business, based on cellphone (mobile location) activity. Borrell positions it as a way to "understand the unique competitive landscape of any local business."

Where Compass describes the money flowing through a market, Local Scope describes the people a given business actually reaches.

Choose Local Scope when you need to:

  • Understand who a local business's customers are demographically
  • Assess the competitive landscape around a specific business
  • Support a pitch or plan with customer-profile evidence rather than spend figures

Side-by-Side Comparison

Dimension Compass Local Scope
Core question answered How much is spent on advertising/marketing? Who are a business's customers?
Primary data Ad and marketing expenditure tracking and forecasts Cellphone activity-based demographic profiles
Unit of analysis Markets, geographies, business types, media categories Individual local businesses and their customers
Geography granularity Down to county level Any local business
Best for Market sizing, spend benchmarking, forecasting Customer profiling, competitive landscape analysis

How They Complement Each Other

The two products are not substitutes. A complete local market analysis often needs both halves: Compass tells you the size and direction of the spending opportunity, while Local Scope tells you who the audience is and how the competitive field is shaped. Used together, they connect "how much money is in play" with "who is being reached."

Access and Practical Notes

Borrell's site references subscription plans and separate log-ins for Compass and the website, and report pages include an "Add to Cart" flow and a subscription log-in prompt. Access to market-level data can be configured for any geography down to the county level. Pricing details are not specified on the pages reviewed, so check the Subscription Plans page for current terms before assuming what a given access level includes.