Location Intelligence For Effective Outdoor Advertising

Facilitating a great customer experience is one of the top priorities for brands in today's digital age. To this end, brands are leveraging location intelligence for tackling a variety of challenges related to discovery, engagement and activation of customers at the right time and place. Since location intelligence can help reveal relationships between data sets that would have not been obvious otherwise, one media segment that has been benefiting more than any other, is outdoor advertising.

When it comes to out-of-home (OOH) advertising, the application of a geo-centric approach for the measurement of advertising impact can yield significantly insightful and accurate results. With the identification of OOH impact zones on the basis of areas of location and application of customers and advanced analytics, marketers can isolate the impact of OOH campaigns. Apart from this, owing to the fact that it is the campaign with which customers engage the most, hence location intelligence is crucial for OOH media, as it helps in choosing the most cost-effective space for a business’s campaigns.

With location history as the raw material for a data-driven outdoor campaign, one can gain audience in-sights and continue the buyer's journey, allowing the measurement of impact, as well as getting more ROI.

With so many benefits, let us take a look at how location intelligence data is currently being used in novel ways in the OOH ecosystem.

• Gaining Market and Audience Insights: Empowering the outdoor marketing ecosystem, location intelligence can help marketers in understanding the audience that can be reached at a particular location and when. This data goes far beyond mere age and demographic information with much more sophisticated targeting criteria, behavioural information such as money spent in a particular retail outlet, plans to start university education, likelihood to be buying a new asset such as a car etc. can be gained.

• Mobile Retargeting: OOH advertising can work wonders in conjunction with mobile advertising, for reaching individuals while on the go. A lot of outdoor marketing media companies are now offering Mobile extension programmes, via which advertisers can narrow down individuals who have been exposed to outdoor ads and then re-target them, with the same advertisement right onto their mobiles.

• Creative Optimization: Audience location intelligence gathered from a particular area can also help in creative optimisation in numerous ways. For example, when it comes to printed OOH, the creatives can be tailored to reach the most prevalent audience in the vicinity of the advertisement, with a relevant message. For Digital OOH, the creatives can be changed in real-time. In fact, the optimisation can be made on extremely precise levels such as longer duration of message viewing when the traffic is at standstill and briefer messages while displaying to moving traffic, or even the customisation of an advertisement on the basis of the devices which are present in the viewable area of the inventory.

• Attribution: The ability to measure the effectiveness of a campaign is extremely crucial for all marketers. Outdoor marketing is in a position to make the impact of the platform known in novel ways, owing to location intelligence. Leveraging location intelligence, a lot of companies have offerings that can help in the passive identification of individuals who have been exposed to OOH advertising, and then correlate it with whether that exposure helps in lifting a brand’s KPIs.

With new data sets proliferating across verticals of the marketing landscape, what sets location intelligence apart, is the volume, precision, accuracy and persistence of data that it delivers. With the exponential collection of geolocation data, precision and reliability enhance, which is why outdoor marketers now have an opportunity to use all the information gathered in innovative ways, which can help in establishing themselves as experts in audience location intelligence.

Having an edge over digital advertising as it does not suffer from bots, fraud, fragmentation, etc, OOH advertising has been on a meteoric rise again. While digitisation might have been a struggle for certain traditional advertising platforms, the outdoor advertising industry continues to thrive on it, which means that location intelligence is only going to further its success and contribute to the growth of the industry.