Are you looking for an advertisement platform that target people roaming around malls, streets, cafes, bars or even in airport? Targeted DOOH is the answer for you!
Digital signs traditionally just display pre-programmed content. It does not matter who is walking by the sign because the sign has no way of knowing who is close by. Consumers are used to targeted ads online, of course, but out-of-home advertising has never been able to do the same.
Targeted DOOH (Digital Out of Home) technology is about to change all of that. Now, the same kind of targeting that we are accustomed to online could find its way onto digital billboards and signs all around us. Of course there are differences – for starters billboards must cater to whole crowds of people, not individual users. So data aggregation in real time accompanies the targeting. Targeted DOOH technology assesses the demographic averages of the crowd in close proximity to the sign and then serves the ad that is most relevant to the whole crowd.
Here we are going to discuss how targeted DOOH can change the thinking of advertisers who are looking for effective offline mediums. We will learn how targeted DOOH can increase brand impressions and sales from the leading name in DOOH industry Mr. Jonathan Frangakis from crowd analytics platform Mira. Here we go!
#1 First of all thank you very much for the time to give an interview for our blog. Can you please share how you started your journey in this industry?
Frangakis: A few years ago, my brother Gabe and I were driving down to see our parents and a natural conversation led to the basic idea for Mira. We felt there was an incredible opportunity in a technologically nascent industry and that we had the perfect set of skills between the two of us to pull it off. Gabe had been writing code since he was 10, got an applied math degree focused in CS from Harvard, and was working at a quantitative hedge fund at the time. I had a strong leadership background as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps, lots of technology sales and sales management experience, as well as an advertising background. We figured together we could build it, sell it, and scale it when the time was right.
#2 According to you, what is targeted DOOH?
First, let’s start with Digital Out of Home (DOOH). We see it everywhere, whether it’s a digital sign in a mall or times square, a TV on a gas pump or in a taxi. For the purposes of what we built, we define it as all the screens in all the different public spaces that have 2 things in common. First, they serve us advertising, and second, they don’t know anything meaningful about the group of people immediately present.
Mira changes that. Targeted DOOH spots have input about who the actual audience in close proximity is. In the case of Mira, it’s from 2 billion real time mobile location events that we see each day in the US which are tied to anonymous 3rd party consumer records. This gives us the ability to measure the average consumer at a given location and serve optimized ads in real time on the DOOH screens.
So targeted DOOH, at least how we view it, is not a one-to-one application. Mira gives marketers the ability to increase the likelihood that they are serving the creative with the strongest appeal to the folks that are actually able to see that screen. For example, if the real-time audience indexes as early technology adopters, a car company using that targeted screen would display creative that focuses on its vehicles’ technology selling points. If it is a strong baby-boomer audience, creative that focuses on 3rd row seating and safety since they are all having grandkids now. If it’s a luxury audience, we advertise the luxury package. We can determine if the audience has a high HHI or is predominantly spanish speaking. There’s a total of 16K different attributes that we can combine to make any audience you can think of.
#3 What are some common venues for DOOH? (the places where the ads are being displayed)
The common venue is any physical location you can think of outside of the home. Anywhere from malls to highways to bars and anywhere in between. The channel’s flexibility is part of its enormous untapped value. Think about it, it’s the only advertising channel that is defined by what it’s not (as in not in the home) because it’s easier to mention that than the thousands of things that it is.
#4 How has targeted DOOH changed over time and what is its future?
Targeted DOOH really hasn’t existed before the last 2-3 years. The only “Targetting” had been based on historical audience data. The main reason being that no one was able to apply real time audience composition data. Today, Mira encompasses one approach (using massive amounts of real-time mobile data combined with consumer records) and another approach is centered on computer vision’s ability to decipher age, gender and possibly things like HHI from a video feed. The latter covers more of the audience but has less depth than Mira’s approach. Both are anonymous and both can go a long way to modernizing the DOOH channel. I see the future combining these two techniques. I also think we’ll see the first ever Real Time Bidding Exchange in the form of a Private Marketplace for an agency within the next 2 quarters which will be a huge deal that could catapult the US DOOH industry from less than $5B in 2016 to over $50B in the next decade as more and more inventory becomes available on Real-Time Bidding exchanges.
#5 How do you measure the performance of a targeted DOOH campaign for your clients?
We have several different methods to measure attribution for our clients. A few examples are conducting brand recall surveys, utilizing unique URLs, measuring walk-in rate, introducing 3rd party audience validation, and several more.
#6 Your thoughts on DOOH advertisements vs other advertisement form?
DOOH has some distinct advantages over more “online” channels. For example, there are no bots out there simulating fraudulent impressions. The foot traffic numbers are audited by an industry bureau called GeoPath and others. So advertisers are getting the impressions they pay for. Additionally, you can’t use ad blocker in the physical world and obstructions are baked into the pricing so view-ability isn’t a concern. The one challenge in DOOH comes from a lack of measurability and efficiency. I always say, if we want to be the answer to the problems being faced in display and mobile, we should be asking ourselves “how can I dynamically target a physical crowd of people in real-time”. The answer is Mira.
#7 Which kind of businesses do you see gravitating towards targeted DOOH?
Really any marketer, B2B or B2C, that has more than 1 target audience/demo and buys DOOH would benefit from targeting the medium. Whether they’re selling multiple products, like a department store, or there are several reasons that a consumer would buy a single product, like an auto manufacturer, targeting allows advertisers to deliver the right message to the right audience. Targeting DOOH allows them to deliver that message at the right moment, the path to purchase.
#8 How do you define the target audience or right audience?
Mira works with the agencies to develop target audience profiles and map those to our own audiences. We take into account not only who the advertiser is looking for, but how those audiences manifest themselves in the real world based on historical data. This allows us to plan the campaign around those personas and measure which are indexing highest in real-time, thus allowing us to trigger the creative that matches who is looking at that screen.
#9 What can advertisers expect in DOOH campaign through your platform? (Reporting, Targeting, Retargeting etc.)
We typically see results that indicate a 60% – 85% increase in conversions depending on the metric. We really enjoy putting together attribution studies because they always show at least a 30% ROI and we’ve even seen over 100%. When we wrap up a campaign, we deliver a Post-Campaign Analysis which covers things like number of impressions, breakdown of audience ratios (i.e. how many of those impressions were luxury vs. early tech adopters), and a summary of attribution study if one was conducted.
Thank you.
Do you have any questions for Jonathan? Feel free to ask here or drop us an email. We will try to get detailed feedback and will share with you.
