Written by Bradley Hill
As the fourth of our Mobile Deep Dive sessions, our Out of Home instalment, chaired by a trinity of experts – Richard Hicks (Co-Founder, CScreens), Richard Simkins (Innovation Director, Talon), and Matt Morgan (Account Director, Blis Media) – did not fail in driving home some great points about the increasingly important connection between OOH and Mobile media and content.
Talon’s Richard Simkins opened by illustrating a key insight from Google’s mobile data tool, Our Mobile Planet, which was that over three in five Smartphone owners use their devices in Stores, Airports, Coffee Shops, Restaurants, and on public transport.
…All of these areas are prominent locations for OOH advertising, and importantly, are places where specific types of consumer behaviour are prevalent. Simkins rightly stated that OOH advertising has always been a means of advertising within specific locations with a resonant message, designed to reach users in a specific mind-set. Now we are able to apply this type of thinking within Mobile advertising too and combine executions at scale to make our media work harder.
One of Simkins’ key stats showed that evolving technology is already bringing OOH and Mobile together – NFC is responsible for 30% of OOH CTA engagement on active sites, and emerging solutions such as Powatag and BLE Beacons (Macy’s working test example here) are examples of how integrated OOH/Mobile experiences are becoming increasingly rich – a far cry from early Bluetooth and Infrared call to actions of yesteryear, which were novel but delivered little in the way of an rich brand experience to users.
Matt Morgan from Blis Media stepped up next to highlight the possibilities of hyper-local targeting on mobile. It was hard to come out of the session without being impressed by Blis Media’s flagship products, Infinity and PATH. Most impressive for me was the clever potential applications of PATH, which uses digital fingerprinting to reach users through display advertising by using past and present location behaviours. Their Tesco case study summed up the power of the product, as the brand continues to identify people that regularly visit their key competitors, reaching them with promotional advertising on their smartphones when relaxed and receptive to conquesting advertising. Brilliant!
Blis continue to evolve their technology, and are currently working on tech which uses heat-mapping of consumer’s location behaviours to help inform integrated OOH and Mobile ad strategies – if achieved, it will certainly be of huge interest to agencies.
Richard Hicks from CScreens ended proceedings with his take on OOH and Mobile AV content. CScreens brings together the largely un-tapped area of OOH AV advertising with Digital Device AV advertising across all screens, importantly building-in robust real-time measurement of impacts across multiple devices/screens into their dashboard to provide a one-stop-shop for integrated AV planning and buying. Hicks echoed both Simkins and Morgan in re-enforcing the point that measured use of new tech is a great way to drive the continued success of integrated Digital device and OOH campaigns – CScreens are doing this by using Eye tracking technology to add a layer of age, gender and dwell-time accountability can be used in OOH AV advertising to their live data. In future this means of measurement can even identify instances of users multi-screening in the presence of OOH advertising.
Certainly there is a bright future in which marketers that keep abreast of developments within both spaces are afforded much creative and effective means of bringing integrated OOH and Mobile Device campaigns to life.
