‘There are no barriers to do that now’: JOLT’s new out-of-home platform hoped to be gamechanger for advertisers
JOLT is looking to transform how out-of-home media is planned, bought, and measured with its newly-launched data platform, Spark Intelligence.
Announced earlier this month, the digital media and EV charging network’s new platform uses advanced audience analytics combined with JOLT’s first-party data to offer an impressions-based approach, giving advertisers campaign options across its network.
Built on data from 18 million users and thousands of audience segments, it blends JOLT’s geo-spatial data with industry measurement tools, allowing real-time campaign optimisation, attribution, and measurement across JOLT’s network.
Speaking to Mumbrella, JOLT CEO Doug McNamee said Spark Intelligence is trying to make it easier for advertisers to buy the audiences they want.
“One of the things that digital does really well is make any audience accessible, and the tooling around that is very simple to use,” he said.
“That’s what we’re hoping with Spark Intelligence we can do. If you want to talk to somebody from a specific audience or group, we’re able to surface that for you in a very easy way.
“With the movement towards digitised out-of-home, there are no barriers to do that now for clients. Before we might’ve had campaigns that were spread across classic inventory and digital. Now, with the vast majority of campaigns being digital, there’s no reason why it can’t have the same tooling, audience, and data insights you would get with any other digital campaign.”
McNamee said outdoor has always been an effective broadcast medium, but the benefit of digital outdoor is that you don’t necessarily have to talk to everyone all the time.
“With Spark Intelligence, you can put a message in front of a specific audience and retarget the same audience online. You’re able to improve the return on investment by reducing spend in some cases to only target the sites that over-index for your audience, which enhances the efficiency of the campaign and the channel.”
As it prepares to rapidly scale its data and audience intelligence offering beyond Australia, JOLT has hired data strategist Randall Taylor, who joined JOLT from JCDecaux, where he worked as senior manager – data partnerships and innovation.
“It’s been a whirlwind start – full of excitement,” he told Mumbrella.
“A lot of the investments we’ve made behind the Spark Intelligence platform break down the barriers for our agency partners and brands, and it allows a real fluidity in trading audience impressions across the different kinds of touchpoints that JOLT has within our ecosystem.
“Powered by a deep understanding of audience mobility and temporal data – and by temporal, I mean like time of day, day of the week – we can actually start to build out a measurable opportunity as well that is very rare in out-of-home. So, looking at taking that conversation of post-tech campaign reporting and stretching it.”
JOLT recently announced plans to roll out 130 additional new digital advertising screens across Sydney, significantly expanding its reach in high-traffic areas.
It follows major agreements to roll out thousands of EV chargers across Canada and the growth of JOLT’s UK and New Zealand networks.
This growth follows JOLT’s increasing scale across Australia and New Zealand, delivering more than 250 million MOVE-verified monthly impressions across its network.
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