Mobile and Screens Outside the Home -- One Plus One Equals Three

SITO Mobile, for example, uses location data and real-time analysis to help marketers serve the right message at the right time.  Mike Gamaroff, Senior Vice President, Channel Strategy for SITO says, "The way people move about is the best way to identify consumers."  SITO, he notes, has learned that generating a first ad exposure with out-of-home and then a second and third with mobile in the same day creates the greatest propensity for a consumer to act.

For Nabisco's belVita, SITO used mobile and OOH to geofence health club locations and commuter stations where people were exposed to belVita's OOH advertising. Consumers at these locations were then re-targeted on their mobile devices to reinforce the OOH messaging. Other strategies included contextual targeting via health and wellness/food and drink apps, and geofencing retailers selling belVita's products. The campaign generated more than 10,000 store walk-ins per day (following ad impression view) with cost per walk-in of under 30 cents.

"The reporting that can now be done is truly a game changer for DPB," Gamaroff says. "This has been a shortcoming of the sector in the past, but not today when it is teamed up with mobile."

A.J. Falvo Sr., Director of Digital Marketing, Oxford Communications, said at Advertising Week, "We quantify by 'verified walk-ins.' Working with SITO Mobile, we know if a person clicked an ad and later walked into a store. We look at 'Unique Verified Walk-Ins' on a per-store basis, and we re-target with relevant content."

xAd, which provides location intelligence to drive sales by leveraging a mobile device's current or past location data, worked with Oxfam America during the holiday season to drive qualified web traffic for gift purchases and charitable donations to assist people living in poverty around the world. xAd and Oxfam used a unique mix of targeting strategies to drive awareness of the Oxfam Unwrapped initiative, including proximity targeting (reaching people at places such as shopping centers, malls and grocery stores) and audience targeting (identifying people who have a higher propensity to donate to good causes).

Oxfam saw a 6.5% increase in total donations, a 7% increase in first-time donors and a 13% increase in mobile revenue share year over year.

"We see the convergence of offline and online resulting in an 'always on' consumer," says Monica Ho, CMO of xAd. "Mobile helps us blend the two worlds. Location is so much bigger than we all thought. We're getting great behavioral data tied to location and can measure ad exposure with in-store visitations."

Dan Levi, a DPB veteran and Executive Vice President/CMO of Clear Channel Outdoor, says that "we are deploying mobile in a big way today." He observes that "mobile is forcing marketers to think about location like never before. We can now understand patterns of movement and why people move the way they do, and this creates major opportunities to engage with them along the way."

Early in 2016, Clear Channel launched RADAR, a research, data and analytics platform that fuses mobile location data to help advertisers and agencies more effectively plan and buy OOH media and measure its impact.

But, Levi adds, the fact is that many agencies are still set up as silos, so it can be a challenge to break through to the planning and buying groups.

"When an agency says to me that they don't have an OOH budget, I ask them if they have an 'audience budget'," Levi says. Fortunately, he points out, clients are on board with -- and are highly enthusiastic about -- the mobile-OOH tandem, "and it is client demand that drives innovation."

Our society is shifting to a more active, mobile populace that spends more time in cities, outside the home and on the go. This has resulted in a continued decline and fragmentation of TV in the home and a drop of 12% in desktop usage over the past three years.

It is becoming clear that agencies and advertisers that are focusing on in-home advertising are doing yesterday's business.

To quote Michael Provenzano, CEO/Co-founder, Vistar Media, "OOH is always a better driver of traffic than mobile, but together they are even stronger."

One plus one equals three.

Dan Levi will be among the speakers at the DPAA's annual Video Everywhere Summit in New York on October 27. Brands, agencies, media, ad-tech, mobile and location data, research and technology partners will gather to hear the latest innovation and thought leadership on multi-screen engagement, programmatic, location data, digital out-of-home and other leading topics.

This article was originally publshed at MediaVillage - October 11, 2016.

The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet, Inc. management or associated bloggers.