“Good morning, my dear mobile phone. How are you today?”
You do not at all say this every morning to your phone, but it is almost certain that both your good selves and your mobile phone are greeting each other once you wake up. One with an illuminated, bright LED screen, another with a pair of misty eyes. That is the exact moment that you become “target-able” for advertising for the day thru your mobile phone and where you are at.
Your mobile phone maker, its operating system, the screen size of your mobile device, your time zone, date and time at your location, which are your telcos and internet service providers, your approximate location and others are all visible to the advertising technologies, most of the time by default. Digital advertising protects “Personally identifiable information” for the vast majority, if not all the while via the use of various layers of laws and technologies, but you are still a perfect, anonymous target for advertising for the time being.
We need to understand how the digital advertising ecosystem effectively uses location-based targeting capabilities a little better and boosts the return on investments to the advertiser, given its highly capable conversion propensities, its continuous dynamic, smarter growth over each advertising campaign.
Days that banner advertising was reaching out to the masses with “impression” centric KPIs with no or a little filtering capability are gone. They are still useful in certain projects. However, location-based advertising–that represents “relevancy” and “better engagement quality” when exhibited to the targeted user at correct proximity, at a correct time and a correct crowd level is one of the most effective ways converting a prospect into a valuable sales transaction.
Location-based advertising requires the physical presence of a targeted prospect at a predefined location. Prospect needs to travel and be present at the defined location in the first place. For example, we refer to our fictitious character Lucy, that wants to visit The Heeren in Singapore or Pavilion in Kuala Lumpur for some shopping and browsing soon. Since she did not show presence at Orchard Road or Bukit Bintang Street, she was not yet receiving any exciting advertisements that the merchants put up there.
But how can we be certain about her whereabouts and say that she is not in the area yet? Her mobile device’s communication with the cellular network towers and GPS chip in her mobile’s hardware gives us certain clues about it. Location-based targeted advertising seeks to reach out to the prospects in a pre-defined GPS circumference nearby the advertisers and Lucy is not receiving any ads yet. This is because we are almost confident that she is not there yet.
We realize that with the deep penetration of gadgets in our lives nowadays, there is a significant shift in users’ attitudes when compared to the past and they are now being relaxed releasing their data. Provided that the integrity of the protection and anonymity of the personally identifiable information is intact, full respect to the user’s privacy is in place, any and everyone is safely targetable for some quality advertising. Every day, we are leaving footprints as traces, be it via access tokens, responses to QR codes or one of the conventional ways of card payments.
Lucy just entered the mall via a ground floor gate and became targetable for nearby merchants’ advertising. A shoe brand on the second floor had its advertising kicked in first. Oh, that is a “red” shoe shown on the social media platform Lucy is using to check-in and the ad creative shows that there is a 15% discount today at that outlet that is just metres away from her. Can you miss this, Lucy?
The café at level B1 of the adjacent mall also has its advertising kicking in as well. Oh, there is a promotion there. Lucy can get a cup of Americano for free, should she purchase a buttery French croissant within the next hour. This is a non-peak period for the café and it was an excellent opportunity for the owner to generate some walk-in customers using location-based advertising. Lucy is over-excited about shopping and browsing now but knows that she will need to munch something before returning home or office too.
While roaming and shopping on the fourth floor of the building where there is also a cinema, Lucy receives another targeted advertising that promotes free upsize popcorns with drinks for those that purchase movie tickets. While in good spirits, Lucy grabs the deal and endeavours, making her and her significant one’s evening an enjoyable one.
After her shopping, she happily leaves the café and takes a cab to head home first. She received good, relevant deals today. The advertisers achieved high returns to their advertising efforts as well. Lucy left the zone. Location-based advertising will stop showing to her until her next visit.
As these examples show, there is “relevancy” and “interest” in each of these engagements and as much as possible - some “personalization” too. Besides, there are also distance, time, precision targeting and crowd considerations in its advertising science. Should we distinguish user segments (e.g. demographics, psychographics, behaviour) with location-based advertising - like what TV and banner advertising did in the past? Or we must better ask ourselves whether there is such a need to do it while having such high precision targeting tools and advertising science in our hands.
Once planned neatly and operated optimally, return on investment in location-based advertising is significantly favourable to the advertisers. Every dollar spent has a higher propensity to convert a prospect. Also, it is possible to re-target the users later. Reaching out to as many viewers as possible for a “presence required campaign” via nationwide targeting and having the most “impressions” aim in mind might be a costlier option for advertisers. However, with location-based advertising that uses the correct strategies for its campaign while incorporating new digital advances; every penny advertiser invested will probably generate considerably high ROIs.
While it is very engaging, location-based advertising requires superb skills for setup, execution, monitoring and optimizations as well as generating an “exclusion list” for refined results. Your trusted partner - Osprey Media Lab, will handle these measures diligently to ensure its clients will have a delightful experience and valuable returns to their investments.
“Good night, my dear mobile phone. See you tomorrow morning!”
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