Andy Stevens, SVP, Research & Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor Americas
With the flurry of Advertising Week 2016 now safely in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to reflect on what to make of the mash-up of creativity that poured out of the week’s sessions. One of the most interesting trends I noticed was the realignment to place consumers and their content consumption behaviors at the center of the marketing universe. Gone are the days when marketers started with the medium (e.g., TV or digital) and built a consumer strategy from there. As people utilize new technology to consume content on-demand and on-the-go, marketers have realized they need a deeper understanding of what their customers do throughout their day.
Location-based marketing has an important role to play here because we now have the ability to use mobile technology to generate insights derived from people’s movement. These insights can be applied to virtually any form of media, including one that is of particular interest to me, out-of-home (OOH) advertising.
Interestingly, OOH, with its new, sophisticated location-based analytics capabilities, has a new and highly relevant role to play in helping brands reach consumers. What’s more, OOH can arguably help brands target consumers better than virtually any other form of media other than mobile. Here’s why.
OOH is the original form of location-based marketing, and understanding consumer movement has always been at the center of what we do. The difference today is that the targeting technology we use in OOH has improved far beyond the days of counting cars on a highway. Using IP addressable screens, we can now deliver messages as quickly as digital media. And by incorporating mobile data into our analytics, we can deliver the same audience insights and targeting methodology as digital.
At Clear Channel Outdoor Americas (CCOA), our new RADAR tool for campaign planning and measurement, is revolutionizing how marketers can use OOH to target their desired audience segments with a high impact visual medium. Now, marketers can use the same kinds of sophisticated audience segmentation, targeting and insights they already use in their digital campaigns and apply them to OOH advertising to create precise, data-driven campaigns and deliver true ROI.
Here’s how this works in practice. CCOA recently worked with a major domestic auto brand running an OOH campaign to increase consumer visits to dealerships as well as measure purchase intent. The campaign ran across digital and printed CCOA billboards in six DMAs and used RADAR data to identify aggregated consumer segments that were exposed to the OOH campaign allowing us to measure:
• Dealership visit rate
• Brand attitudes (via mobile survey panel)
As a result of the campaign, our client saw a 15 percent increase in dealership visitation rates among the exposed audience, and among this group, saw an increase of a whopping 58 percent in vehicle purchases or leases. What’s more, RADAR helped drive overall lift for the brand, resulting in a 60 percent increase in online searches about the brand and an 18 percent increase in exposed consumers talking to others about the brand.
What’s exciting is that, for the first time, we can say that these truly impressive numbers speak for themselves. These are data driven results fueled by some the best targeting and measurement tools available today across any media. That’s real ROI. We’ve come a long way in OOH, and we’re excited to be playing a leading role in driving new location-based solutions for marketers.
About the Author
Andy Stevens is SVP, Research & Insights, Clear Channel Outdoor Americas