In the digital out of home (DOOH) arena, optimised campaigns have risen to the fore as an alternative to loop-based buying, which sees advertisers’ campaigns displayed across selected digital screens on a high-frequency basis.
But what are optimised campaigns? Optimising your campaign allows you to increase the number of sites that your audience will be exposed to, reducing wastage by stopping ads from being served at locations and times that are not relevant to your audience.
While loop-based buying has its place, optimised campaigns are a great-value alternative, particularly for advertisers who want to maximise their DOOH spend.
We work with our clients to understand what they want to achieve. Are they looking for high frequency and broad awareness? Or perhaps they want to target a specific audience and need their ad to display at a time when that buyer is out and about, in which case optimising their campaign would give them great value.
Location
Choosing the right location to display unique and relevant content based on location, allows you to deliver meaningful ads to potential customers entering that area. This could take into account points of interest (shopping malls or airports), proximity to store location, as well as the audience category (demographical information or behavioural patterns).
For example, say we want to target caregivers. We can optimise campaigns to sites that are near schools so that they’re more visible to parents.
Time
Displaying a brand message at the right time allows you to target particular audiences more effectively.
We’ve decided to target parents, so will run our campaign on all sites that are close to schools. Now, we optimise further to only flight ads at school drop-off and pick-up times, fine-tuning our roll-out.
Moment
This is one step beyond location and time and involves delivering contextually relevant content.
New technology allows ads to be served when a specific weather pattern shows. Triggers can also be created around sports and news events, traffic patterns, financial marketing or stock market data and more.
We’re targeting caregivers at sites close to schools, flighting our ads at specific drop-off and collection times. Now we can optimise even further, using contextually relevant triggers. If we’re a kiddies ice-cream brand, we can choose to flight our ads only when it is warm, helping increase resonance among our target buyers.
With the DOOH landscape becoming increasingly saturated – particularly in the metros – marketers need to think differently about how they buy media.
It’s great that OOH can now determine audience movements throughout the day, serving contextually relevant messages based on these insights. For example, if we’re targeting those who are primarily responsible for household buying via DOOH, there’s little point in flighting a roadside ad late at night when they’re likely to be at home with their families, and waste that spend.
We want clients to know that now have options and flexibility. Particularly if they want to stretch their budgets, optimising campaigns will give them more impact for their spend.
Lizelle Mc Connell is sales director at Tractor Outdoor.
