Features

How does… out of home audience targeting work?

We've asked some of the industry's most knowledgable boffins to break down industry jargon to help you through those confusing meetings and indecipherable conferences. This week, Adshel's Melanie Lindquist explains how out of home audience targeting works.

Audience targeting is now significantly more sophisticated than ever before. The days of tagging a street directory with panel IDs to show advertising locations has evolved into a complex audience-led model, with millions invested in understanding who these audiences are, what they think and how they move.

The technique starts with a base of audience intelligence, a source of consumer information like Roy Morgan data. This base intelligence is not just about where audiences are located, but also matched with hundreds of insights including demographic, psychographic, attitudinal, transactional and behavioural information.

This is where it gets really exciting for brands. These data-rich audience profiles are matched to location data that includes panels on a bus shelter, digital screens inside a railway station, large format billboards and screens at airports.

When a brand needs to target an audience, out of home media owners use those audience profiles to identify where those audience are located, which out of home advertising assets are seen by those audiences and when they will see these assets.

Each out of home provider uses a blend of audience measurement methodology to not only understand these audiences, but also how their out of home assets influence these audiences in their daily lives. For example, some providers use facial recognition technology to track audience engagement and movement.

Why is this important?

Audience measurement helps marketers and their agencies to develop campaigns that precisely target audiences beyond demographics and to an individual location. In an era of personalisation, relevant creative seen by the target audience at the right time and in the right environment dramatically improves return on investment.

Audience targeting is also critical as ad tech continues to create new out of home capabilities. The benefits of digital out of home (DOOH) range from short creative deadlines, live in-campaign changes that take minutes, to triggered creative (weather, time, temperature, pollen count, even humidity count) opening up new opportunities for brands.

These digital out of home campaigns, backed by well-defined audience data and contextually relevant creative, is proven to uplift campaign performance.

What’s next for audience targeting?

This year audience targeting has evolved another step allowing marketers the flexibility to advertise with time, day and location targeting and media buys. That’s not something previously possible.

Tech will continue to drive innovation and push the limits of out of home’s capability. Audiences will also continue to increase demand for connectivity in their daily lives.

This will compel marketers to integrate beacons, geo-fencing, facial recognition, emotional tracking, voice activation and movement tracking into their out of home investment.

This connected, contextual and targeted approach will continue to evolve audiences into customers and drive campaign ROI.

Exciting times ahead.

Melanie Lindquist is Adshel’s head of client strategy.

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