Is location the holy grail of advertising?

Is location the holy grail of advertising?

Marketers have long been in search of a way to reach consumers at just the right moment – location ads could be exactly what they’re looking for

 

Reaching the right person with the right message at the right time has long been the holy grail of marketing. Location, and the insights it provides, allows marketers to finally reach that goal. By understanding the patterns in consumers’ physical movements through mobile devices, marketers are able to deliver the most personalised and relevant advertising to date, thus allowing brands to more effectively help consumers make the best decisions.

It’s not just maps and directions for which we rely on location. For example, dating app Tinder helps people find dates within their general area. Uber, recently valued at $40bn (£26bn), directs an available driver to the appropriate street corner or building. GrubHub and Seamless let me sit on my couch and order food from dozens of local restaurants, while Nike+ knows the distances you run to motivate you to go further.

Imagine as a marketer if you could tap into those behaviours. For marketers, location provides the context to understand what people want in the moments they want it. Don’t show me a Thai restaurant menu if I can’t get my Pad Thai right now – and don’t show me an ad for a steakhouse while I’m at a vegan health food store.

Marketers are playing catch-up to consumers’ desire for more relevance. As Joe Laszlo, senior director at the IAB Mobile Marketing Centre of Excellence, says:

“Whatever the state of mobile itself in a given country, in every market it feels like consumers lead the way. Media companies are doing their best to follow and agencies and brands, on average, tend to lag a bit, puzzled by mobile or unsure how to respond to the shift of the digital audience to phones and tablets.”

BIA/Kelsey predicted that location-targeted mobile advertising will grow faster than overall mobile advertising and will represent 43% of all mobile ads by 2019. BIA/Kelsey analyst Mike Boland explained the trend: “As the ability to attribute a sale to a mobile ad becomes clearer, marketers will be better able to determine the return on investment of their efforts, which should lead to be bigger investments … for example, tracking user behaviour after they’ve seen an ad to determine that they showed up at a store or, even better, made a purchase.”

Around the world, companies are quickly honing technologies and data insights to connect online mobile activities to offline store visits and sales. So how does it work? If people expect the convenience and relevance that location signals provide, why isn’t everyone using location? It’s because there are only a few companies who can do it with accuracy and scale.

Here’s how location works in mobile advertising. When a person uses an app or mobile website, they often grant access for publishers and developers to use their location information. This location data can be as general as a zip or postal code or city, or as specific as a user’s exact location at any given time, usually provided as GPS coordinates in the ad request from the publisher to the ad network or demand side platform (DSP).

The precision of the data signal determines whether we can pinpoint a user to a location within five and 10 meters, or within a state or region. Precision is required for specific targeting and also for understanding audience behaviors based on the places they have visited. Verifying the data signal is accurate and tying that signal to a physical location takes incredibly sophisticated technology and broad scale.

The power that location gives marketers is incredible. Location allows marketers to better understand their audiences and the ability to influence them. Marketers need to learn not only who their most receptive consumers are and how they’re using mobile devices across their path to purchase, but also when to reach them with the most relevant message to drive further action and conversion.

Using insights from place-based behaviours, we can visualise the audience. For example, if we see that a person has frequented two airports in Singapore and Shanghai in the past month, and visits Singapore hotels on weekdays, we can probably gather that this is a business traveler based on the device visitation behaviour. This approach gives marketers access to more accurate target audiences, leaving marketers more likely to achieve greater results and ROI on their ad budgets.

Using mobile location data, marketers can have more visibility into who their customers are, what their needs are, and how to influence their decisions. Location is the key to unlocking the definitive value of mobile advertising. When leveraged correctly, location is poised to become one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. So next time you’re summoning your on-demand food and taxis, remember that the power of location is already in your hands – you just need to learn how to harness it.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/feb/16/the-future-of-advertising-what-will-2025-look-like

Is location the holy grail of advertising?

Marketers have long been in search of a way to reach consumers at just the right moment – location ads could be exactly what they’re looking for

 

Reaching the right person with the right message at the right time has long been the holy grail of marketing. Location, and the insights it provides, allows marketers to finally reach that goal. By understanding the patterns in consumers’ physical movements through mobile devices, marketers are able to deliver the most personalised and relevant advertising to date, thus allowing brands to more effectively help consumers make the best decisions.

It’s not just maps and directions for which we rely on location. For example, dating app Tinder helps people find dates within their general area. Uber, recently valued at $40bn (£26bn), directs an available driver to the appropriate street corner or building. GrubHub and Seamless let me sit on my couch and order food from dozens of local restaurants, while Nike+ knows the distances you run to motivate you to go further.

Imagine as a marketer if you could tap into those behaviours. For marketers, location provides the context to understand what people want in the moments they want it. Don’t show me a Thai restaurant menu if I can’t get my Pad Thai right now – and don’t show me an ad for a steakhouse while I’m at a vegan health food store.

Marketers are playing catch-up to consumers’ desire for more relevance. As Joe Laszlo, senior director at the IAB Mobile Marketing Centre of Excellence, says:

“Whatever the state of mobile itself in a given country, in every market it feels like consumers lead the way. Media companies are doing their best to follow and agencies and brands, on average, tend to lag a bit, puzzled by mobile or unsure how to respond to the shift of the digital audience to phones and tablets.”

BIA/Kelsey predicted that location-targeted mobile advertising will grow faster than overall mobile advertising and will represent 43% of all mobile ads by 2019. BIA/Kelsey analyst Mike Boland explained the trend: “As the ability to attribute a sale to a mobile ad becomes clearer, marketers will be better able to determine the return on investment of their efforts, which should lead to be bigger investments … for example, tracking user behaviour after they’ve seen an ad to determine that they showed up at a store or, even better, made a purchase.”

Around the world, companies are quickly honing technologies and data insights to connect online mobile activities to offline store visits and sales. So how does it work? If people expect the convenience and relevance that location signals provide, why isn’t everyone using location? It’s because there are only a few companies who can do it with accuracy and scale.

Here’s how location works in mobile advertising. When a person uses an app or mobile website, they often grant access for publishers and developers to use their location information. This location data can be as general as a zip or postal code or city, or as specific as a user’s exact location at any given time, usually provided as GPS coordinates in the ad request from the publisher to the ad network or demand side platform (DSP).

The precision of the data signal determines whether we can pinpoint a user to a location within five and 10 meters, or within a state or region. Precision is required for specific targeting and also for understanding audience behaviors based on the places they have visited. Verifying the data signal is accurate and tying that signal to a physical location takes incredibly sophisticated technology and broad scale.

The power that location gives marketers is incredible. Location allows marketers to better understand their audiences and the ability to influence them. Marketers need to learn not only who their most receptive consumers are and how they’re using mobile devices across their path to purchase, but also when to reach them with the most relevant message to drive further action and conversion.

Using insights from place-based behaviours, we can visualise the audience. For example, if we see that a person has frequented two airports in Singapore and Shanghai in the past month, and visits Singapore hotels on weekdays, we can probably gather that this is a business traveler based on the device visitation behaviour. This approach gives marketers access to more accurate target audiences, leaving marketers more likely to achieve greater results and ROI on their ad budgets.

Using mobile location data, marketers can have more visibility into who their customers are, what their needs are, and how to influence their decisions. Location is the key to unlocking the definitive value of mobile advertising. When leveraged correctly, location is poised to become one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. So next time you’re summoning your on-demand food and taxis, remember that the power of location is already in your hands – you just need to learn how to harness it.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/feb/16/the-future-of-advertising-what-will-2025-look-like