Advertising beyond walled gardens - Part 2: OOH with Adsquare

For the second post in our series, we are exploring how advertisers can diversify their media buying outside of walled gardens. Today, we will look at Out of Home solutions in partnership with Adsquare.

Thanks, Christoph Herwig, VP Global Marketing at Adsquare, for helping us understand what’s behind the data-driven Out of Home (OOH) transformation. 

Lauriane Tiard-Caillaud from MMT in an interview with Christoph Herwig from Adsquare:

Thank you Christoph for sharing your insights on OOH with us and our readers, and for talking to me today about how brands can be present in a variety of other media channels beyond walled gardens.

If you had to choose one solution beyond walled gardens, why would you choose your OOH?

Adsquare’s OOH solutions give advertisers and their OOH agency planners the ability to choose poster frame locations based on audience, spatial and movement data using an interactive visual mapping interface. Our integrations with all relevant DSPs also allow OOH advertising to run fully programmatically, tailored to time, place and audiences. Omni-channel campaigns can also be delivered in real-time, which extends campaign creativity to mobile when a user is in proximity of a poster location or retargets the content multi-screen at a later time after the user has passed by a poster location. Finally, it gives advertisers audience insights so that they can better personalize their campaigns, optimize their OOH spending and understand campaign effectiveness by analyzing in-store footfall attribution.

Over the next few years, OOH will take its place at the heart of integrated, automated and measurable campaigns. DOOH is growing at nearly twice the rate of the total OOH industry and is forecast to reach $8.5 billion by 2023. And it’s no wonder, as 50% of consumers pay attention to location-based digital OOH advertising all or most of the time. Almost 70% of adults see a digital screen each week, which corresponds to broader coverage than that offered by commercial radio.

In other words, Adsquare provides data empowered targeting solutions to select the right OOH environment programmatically. This data is used to locate and then measure campaign impact. Is that right? Statista shows a smartphone penetration of 86% of the German population, which is promising. OOH has suffered from a lack of targeting data offering the level of granularity that makes it possible to integrate OOH in some tactical campaigns without losing focus.

What are the major benefits of Adsquare compared to walled gardens?

Speaking to media buying in general, not just specifically to OOH, it is important that advertisers are not limited in their media options when delivering campaigns. So, one benefit is that Adsquare offers marketers more flexibility and provides access to broader portfolios. Campaign measurement is also at its most robust when conducted by an independent party. In the context of footfall measurement, it’s important that the technology measuring the results of a campaign is independent of the technology running the campaign. Media partners should, in short, not grade their own homework. The obvious solution to this challenge is to work with an independent data partner that conducts your measurement analysis. Not only do these partners need to be able to work with whichever DSP you use, but, more importantly, they also need to be completely independent of the platform provider as well as your business. Using an independent partner in this way gives your measurement more credibility, which helps mFake future budgets easier to secure. It also provides you with unbiased insights into how you can make your campaigns more effective.

As a data science company, we understand this very well! The quality and impartiality of the data source being used for measurement is essential for providing relevant insights. As per enlarging the field of play, I believe that no advertiser should limit themselves to one platform, however successful at first, as doing so increases dependence and, therefore, risk.

What are the major benefits of Adsquare’s solution when compared to the others?

As a third-party intelligence provider, Adsquare aggregates geo-spatial data, audience data and movement data at a global scale. Our data is transformed into various data solutions, easily accessible on our self-service platform, which is integrated with leading DSPs. We advocate transparency in our activities and full control for our clients.

To be more precise, for our OOH solutions we combine mobile audience data with movement data to index DOOH screens based on the ratio between all users seen in proximity of the inventory and users seen at the screens that are part of the targeting segment of choice. These calculations allow Adsquare to score each DOOH screen so that buyers can target those that have a high propensity of reaching their desired audience segment. The map-centric tool comes with many additional features such as a weighting feature where results can be compared against OOH currency data. What’s more, is that our platform users can onboard their own audience and spatial data to be used in the planner.

Your technology relies on mobile data as you already mentioned. Could you clarify how your data collection is operated or is it a proprietary secret and you would have to kill me for it?

We are passionately candid and always happy to explain our approach. The movement data we operate with is SDK-derived background location data from end-users who have given their consent in advance for this data to be shared. Adsquare obtains movement data from a variety of apps, including transport, weather and utility apps. This guarantees that our panel consists of a representative cross-section of society in terms of socio-demographic characteristics and geographical distribution. Background location data is more detailed and granular than, let’s say, foreground data and therefore much more useful for location placing.  

What are the constraints of your solution, e.g. entry ticket, production cost, lead time and reach building?

Implementation is very straightforward and there are no constraints attached to using Adsquare data, whether it’s via our own platform or directly in your preferred DSP. To make sense of our OOH solutions, operators only need to upload their poster inventory locations to our platform. If partners wish to activate DOOH campaigns programmatically, Adsquare maps their preferred DPS seat IDs to their corresponding client account on our platform for seamless activations.

As is usually the case, it seems to take a collaborative effort with OOH partners in order to leverage your data to the fullest. We will delve further into the topic of OOH directly in a separate article dedicated to the channel in August. To go back to mobile data, what kind of granularity can your data provide? Which audiences do you address?

Our audience data taxonomy comprises various categories including but not limited to Census data, e.g. age group, gender, income level, marital and family status App and web behavioral data providing insights on interests and affinities Geo-behavioral data including places visited like shops, restaurants, car dealerships, transportation hubs, gyms, etc. Purchase information for groceries, retail, entertainment, services, etc. Business data like job titles, company size and industry. Being able to combine granular datasets with one another leaves marketers infinite possibilities for customization by enabling them to keep control over reach and quality. Marketers expect privacy-first data solutions in 2021 and the data-sourcing process is becoming more transparent. 

So, if marketers wish to target "parents" or "singles" you can cluster these groups?

Yes. Information on personal status is part of census data which Adsquare has mapped to Mobile Advertising IDs. In addition, marketers can add baby goods shoppers or dating app users with an AND or OR combination to further influence the reach and quality of the audience set-up.

We are curious about your solution. Could you maybe give us an overview here? Maybe give us an idea of the penetration of your solutions into the European population.

We live in the age of "big data" and we are constantly told that huge volumes of data are required for the best results. But when it comes to leveraging our OOH solutions or understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimizing your approach, this patently isn’t the case. By putting in place a focused methodology that prioritizes accuracy over volume, you can reveal all the insights you need. Our OOH and footfall measurement solutions rely on a panel-based approach where statistically relevant sample sizes are all you need to generate index values and uplift metrics.

How has COVID affected your data collection?

Consumer behavior has changed during the pandemic, and we have translated these new patterns into actionable data segments so that marketers are able to respond to the new norms.

As a consequence of governmental restrictions, retailers, restaurants, theaters, etc., have been temporarily closed or still are. Hence, people's movements have been drastically reduced. Consumers are reprioritizing their purchase intent and finding new ways to order products and services. We have seen digital consumption go up. With more people working from home, living in quarantine and/or in lock-down, marketers are able to reach more consumers digitally and increase engagement KPIs, whether they are targeting home entertainment enthusiasts, fast food lovers, fitness buffs or online shoppers.

By the way, the fact that digital consumption went up doesn't mean we're not out and about. Walking and running became top activities. I've learned that 15% of those living in big cities are going grocery shopping everyday in these times.

With the ever-increasing use of mobile in managing our daily lives, our behavior says a lot about what we do and who we are. As smartphones become the norm in our society, they offer a granular and steady source of data that is quite representative of the general population. Having constant access to factual information on consumer behavior in terms of movement as well as mobile usage on a daily basis reveals precise habits without disturbing their patterns. Adsquare has found a great way to leverage this data in order to offset a weakness in OOH media: measurement and targeting.

MMT has recently integrated a segment builder capability in our media buying module. Each campaign can be built with integration of segment data structure into booking requests. The Adsquare data set can be integrated and allocated to any campaign directly from the media plan bookings. 

Christopher, thank you very much for your time, the fascinating conversation about Out of Home. We are very much looking forward to further collaboration with you and your team at Adsquare.

We hope you enjoyed the interview with Christopher Herwig from Adsquare and that you were able to take away useful information for you and your company. To discuss your individual challenges and how you can scale outside the walled gardens with our leading media management platform MMT Mercury, I am available for a personal meeting.