Advertising’s Oldest Medium Is Primed to Fill the Cookie Gap

A privacy-first industry lies ahead. An industry that's relied on easy access to data will find such analytics much harder to come by. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has already had a profound impact on data availability. Cookies are on the way out, and alternative data available through mobile device IDs is diminishing. The digital advertising industry has had to adapt to create new ways to reach the right audiences with the right message at the right time. How to even start putting the right thing in front of the right person has kept many marketers up at night in the past year. But help is coming from an unlikely place. While other mediums have spent lockdown battening down the hatches and focusing on their core offerings, out-of-home advertising has been investing in reinvention, to the point where it can now be considered a leader in how to approach the cookieless future. The power of context Advances in ad tech have allowed for context-aware data to stand in as a worthy substitute for personal data, providing a means to target audiences without compromising their privacy. OOH is ideally suited to geo-contextual targeting. Audiences can be targeted in near real time based on where and when they go to various locations. That ability to predict movement patterns for particular audiences across geographical locations is key to amplifying the reach of OOH. Whether someone's commuting down a main arterial road or just crossing from urban city regions into nearby parkland, the advertising connection can be made without cookies. This ability builds on the existing proximity targeting proposition or targeting people within a given radius of a store location. Crucially, the creative can build on that insight in a way that actively helps consumers. A cheap hotel room coupled with a reminder to not drive tired by a motorway or a poster alerting people to the fact that their next petrol station isn’t just the last for a while, it’s also the last with an M&S tie-in. We’ve come a long way from a coffee shop using a billboard to say, "We’re just around the corner." Throw in some creative, some data, and it gets interesting. One type of data that is in high demand is telco data. Spatial telco data is cross-referenced movement and CRM data in an aggregated and anonymized form connected to a location such as a postal code. It allows the identification of areas that are genuinely relevant to the defined target group. In this way, the advertising message reaches the right person without using any personal identifiers. But it’s not the only data element helping reimagine contextual advertising for our privacy-first age. Other proximity-based data sets can be leveraged. For example, weather data, client sales data, census data or geo-located purchase data can be used to determine if an area has been the site of many sofa purchases. Coupled with the flexibility of automated digital posters, access to those data sets means advertisers can serve just the right ad to just the right audience at just the right time. It can get specific. Think about an employee leaving the office at midday looking for lunchtime snacks. That person might see a Kit Kat advertisement on the way out. The ad not only suggests a food item, it comes with the invitation to “Take a break, have a Kit Kat.” In other words, OOH offers a less problematic environment in a privacy-first world, but in a way that can be just as personalized. The importance of planning To understand where people might be going, we need to understand where they’ve been. And by extension, predictive modeling requires preexisting data. An up-to-date view of audience mobility patterns is crucial. It’s increasingly challenging to understand consumers as their usual patterns, such as their commute, are constantly changing. For OOH, a good option is building an in-house platform that uses multiple behavioral and attitudinal data sources to create a detailed picture of audience activity and intent. The platform uses near real-time data, with data sets refreshed daily and new data sets evaluated and onboarded regularly. This offers key insights into which inventory is best placed to reach the target audience at the right time to optimize campaign planning for all routes to market, including programmatic OOH. .Planning with privacy-first in mind Consumers increasingly care about how businesses consume their data. Still, more than 70% prefer ads tailored to their interests and shopping habits. Furthermore, customers are willing to continue to share their data in exchange for free content and added functionalities. For advertisers, this means partnering with publishers that can show value to consumers while utilizing owned data sets and client first-party data sets to enhance media planning and optimization with the audience in mind. Brands need measurable, effective and demonstrably profitable results. They’re reliant on campaigns built on a detailed understanding of audiences. In a world without cookies, that's going to increasingly be the preserve of channels previously associated with mass, non-tailored reach such as linear TV, OOH and cinema. The ad-tech ecosystem is having to adapt to a very different world, post-GDPR, and the pandemic. OOH has used its time in hibernation to the fullest. While other sectors might be taken aback by privacy changes, OOH has been quietly innovating to ensure it is well insulated against the impact. Not only is it ready to adapt further if needed, but it’ll be leading the way post-cookie.