ABC what? OOH gets tactical with behavioural targeting

More relevant targeting, based on people’s real and recent location behaviours, delivers better outcomes for advertisers, writes Sophie Pemberton

Ask me to describe myself and the last thing you’ll see being typed into my Twitter bio is ‘25-34 year old ABC1 female’. There isn’t a significant amount of meaningful insight that can be gleaned from that information.

And yet these demographics still form the basis for how the majority of out of home is planned and bought. Whilst digital advertisers have been leveraging behavioural data for some time, in fact it’s used in more than 50% of total digital display ad spend across Europe, only a selective uptake of these marketing techniques is happening across offline channels.

But with digital transformation, improved infrastructure and the growing sophistication of ad tech platforms, OOH is now well primed to take advantage of the expanding mass of behavioural data for audience targeting. It is now possible to manage and activate billions of device-level audience data points to create new insights about how people behave and how to effectively reach and engage them while on-the-go.

Unlike online, OOH will always be a one-to-many medium. Audience data is aggregated and layered with rich insights about the location and visibility of inventory, so that panels are relevant to the audiences that advertisers really want to reach, without breaching the increasingly stringent privacy legislation, outlined here.

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With digital OOH, the potential for increasingly sophisticated data-led strategies is two-fold. Behavioural data can be applied at both a media planning level, and for content creation and optimisation. Updating campaign messages on the go and measuring outcomes based on real world, real-time behaviours and insight, is proving to be highly effective.

Earlier this year, McDonald’s adopted a sophisticated data-led strategy for it’s Saver campaign. McDonald’s operates in a highly competitive category at a time when high street footfall is declining. Simply marketing at scale to a demographically defined mass audiences was not delivering the cut-through needed to drive incremental footfall and steer people away from the competition.

McDonald’s used Ada, an Out of Home data management platform, to trial a radically different approach to creating OOH audience segments. The optimised OOH plan targeted light and infrequent visitors to their restaurants and the results were a real jaw drop moment.

The campaign reached 30% more of McDonald’s on-target audience and reported incremental footfall of +460,000 across four UK cities. The campaign successfully delivered an immediate and sustained increase in visits from both new and existing customers.

McDonald’s have also been tailoring messages based on the data, to find people who weren’t considering McDonald’s for a specific occasion, for example a morning coffee, to push contextual creative to demonstrate how McDonald’s could satisfy that particular need-state. This combination is proven to drive more effective campaign outcomes with messages contextualised to the moment, mindset, and environment.

It’s simple. More relevant targeting, based on people’s real and recent location behaviours, delivers better outcomes for advertisers.

With continued growth in technology and intelligence, we are able to understand more and more about what consumers really care about. Any brand can benefit from the application of behavioural insights in their OOH strategy.

Unified programmatic planning and creative optimisation is the end goal, where planning, buying, distribution, playback, and reporting are programmatically achieved using real-time audience information and data insight to drive the decision-making process. The future is bright for OOH.

Sophie Pemberton is strategy director, Talon