If you’re reading this, you’re likely well-versed in the world of digital marketing. You’ve used paid ads (whether on social, display or mobile) and you may have tested the waters of digital out-of-home advertising. But have you ever thought of combining the two?
A Nielsen study showed that OOH advertising delivered more search activity per ad dollar spent than radio, TV or print. Almost half of adults searched for information after hearing or seeing an ad on a billboard, bus shelter or other OOH medium. With results like that, it’s no wonder companies like Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have increased their OOH advertising budgets over the last few years.
The marriage of digital OOH and mobile advertising is a sweet one. While advertising on mobile feels a bit more personal, digital OOH allows you to reach a broader audience, wherever they are. Digital OOH can create brand awareness, and adding the personal touch of mobile helps move your customer through the buying funnel, ending with sales and recommendations to friends.
Combining mobile and digital OOH is the perfect match, offering invaluable benefits to marketers. Let’s take a closer look at three reasons why.
Mobile data unlocks better targeting for Digital OOH
See that little device sitting on the desk next to you? It’s filled with valuable information for marketers. Using non-personally-identifiable information from mobile devices allows advertisers to gather profiles of potential customers moving past a digital OOH screen. Yes, the concept of audience targeting is a real thing in OOH, even if it is not a “one-to-one” medium (such as online, social or mobile advertising), but rather “one-to-many.”
But don’t worry, we don’t get as creepy as the individual level targeting we’ve all had enough of, which, as it turns out, is going away with the death of the cookie. Through our partnership with our mobile partner Native Touch, you can then target out-of-home screens that are over-indexing on more than 180 specific personas for demographic profiles, interests and activities, as well as intent-to-buy groups. After selecting your targeting criteria, our algorithm will go to work and identify for you the screens with higher concentrations of those personas in proximity to the digital OOH screens.
How granular can we get?
With Broadsign Ads (formerly Campsite), you can access the standard demographic profile targeting (gender, age and income), as well as life-stage targeting, such as business owners, pet owners, mom- and dads-to-be, and so on. You can target specific interests and activities such as avid runners, gamers, and home and garden enthusiasts for example, plus specific intent, such as planning to buy a home or a car soon. No matter who your target audience is, we’re confident we can help you get your message in front of them, on the big screens. But remember, this is a one-to-many medium so it is not a perfect science. Regardless, adding digital OOH to your next campaign, especially ones that are in proximity to your target audience, should be one of the tactics you use.
Of course the fundamentals of targeting the screens within selected environments such as outdoor (billboards), place-based (e.g. retail, restaurants,…) or at proximity to specific points of interest (such as parks, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc) should remain at the core of your campaign planning. As we say, “Context is Queen in OOH!”. And with Broadsign Ads, both audience and environment targeting is easy.
From big screens to screens in your pocket
You likely already know that you can advertise on mobile devices to consumers within a specific area (geo-fencing) and that you can refine that audience even further with geo-targeting (yes, there’s a difference). Using location data, you can run a geo-fenced or geo-targeted mobile campaign in real-time, targeting the mobile devices in areas around the screen locations of your digital OOH campaign. So cool!
With Broadsign Ads, it’s possible to take that even further with mobile retargeting. Using our platform and a mobile partner (Native Touch or your preferred mobile vendor), you can create a new audience segment of mobile device IDs in proximity to the screens in your DOOH campaign.
Once that data is compiled, you have an audience primed for retargeting with a mobile ad campaign. This strategy will allow your organization or product to remain top of mind, with a second touch point, even if they are miles away from your OOH campaign screens. Mobile retargeting of anonymous and aggregated groups of mobile users exposed to your DOOH ad allows you to increase relevance, reinforce brand recognition, and extend your reach.
Note: The recent IOS14 release gives mobile users the ability to choose to block the sharing of their unique identifier (IDFA). What that means is more control in the hands of mobile users allowing them to decide at the app level (and in general) if they want to share information about their device including location. Therefore, ad targeting, including retargeting to users will no longer work for users that opt-out of sharing their IDFA. Same goes for ad measurement: We’ll likely see a reduction over the next year in the fidelity of data available to measure performance across mobile campaigns.
But like Kolin Kleveno, SVP of Addressable Audiences at Tinuti said, “The advertising industry will rally together and develop new, alternative methods for delivering targeted advertising. We will see a wave of new measurement solutions and identifiers emerge in a collective effort to set new privacy-compliant industry standards.” So buckle your seatbelt and get ready for a wave of changes in the next 12 to 18 months around mobile (and display) advertising changes!
Having said that, the relationship between digital OOH and mobile is legit, with research showing that an OOH audience is more likely to engage with their mobile devices than any other audience (think about what you’re doing when you’re waiting for the bus), and one-third of OOH ad viewers looked up an advertiser in a search engine after viewing an OOH ad.
What’s not to like with those results?
Measurement made easy
History has shown that measuring OOH campaigns isn’t easy. But the moment you combine digital OOH with mobile will change your measurement game forever. In collaboration with your mobile partner, mobile location data can be used to measure how many people were in proximity to your OOH ad during a specific time frame, and by comparing OOH-exposed to non-exposed audiences, you can measure increases in foot traffic, sales, app events, online activities and much more.
At Broadsign Ads, one of our goals is to help you answer the primary question: “Have I reached the right people with my digital OOH campaign?”
With our demographic report, you can review not only where your ads played, but also what audiences were reached. More specifically, we break down campaign results using our 180+ demographic profiles to better understand who saw your DOOH ads. This information becomes very valuable for you to improve your future campaigns.
What’s not to love?
Simply put, combining mobile and digital OOH allows you to reach more people. While digital OOH allows you to be present at many touch points in your customer’s life, mobile devices can deliver personalized messages while collecting valuable engagement and visitation data. Combining your messages across both channels, segmenting your audience, and retargeting for ultimate recall can increase your impact and engagement, which looks great for your bottom line.
Want to learn more? Book a discovery call to chat with one of our experts.
