MediaPost: When Is Using A Cellphone Not Mobile Usage?
By Sean McCaffrey | MediaPost
As the penetration of mobile devices reaches near saturation in America, quantitative data alone becomes an inadequate guide as to how to target consumers when and where they have intent to purchase. Advertisers seek newer media formats for reaching consumers, with a renewed emphasis on qualitative data.
With sea change about in data use and media decisions, reaching the right consumer in the right context at the right time is still paramount to driving real business growth.
Some of those new media have actually been hiding in plain sight, among them video advertising at fuel stations and, particularly so, in summer.
According to Pew, some 70% of mobile device usage now takes place in the home with 99% of consumers using devices there every week. Additionally, the two next most frequent places of weekly use are “in transit” (82%) and at work (69%), neither of which may involve a “ready to purchase” context.
These are not surprising research findings, but they highlight the need for more creative and lateral thinking from marketers. That’s particularly so when you realize mobile video consumers are most often watching at home, according to recent research by the Streaming Video Alliance — and those that do watch on the go are 17+% more likely to skip mobile video ads, per Magna and IPG Media Lab. This all makes it even harder for traditional advertising media to reach consumers during the summer months when we’re leading even more active lives.
For advertisers, the situation will get worse next quarter thanks to external factors. Chief among them is the continuing demise in the audience numbers watching more traditional television, which is subject to an even more dramatic seasonal decline in summer.
There is also real pressure on air-time as we contemplate a fall season full of political advertising ahead of the November midterms. Given the requirement for media outlets to squeeze in as much on-air political balance as possible, the cost of other airtime soars, creating a very real trickle-down effect into the summer months. Non-political advertisers will seek better value ahead of September and October.
Increased demand inevitably leads to higher costs — particularly in digital budgets, where 60% of the spend is now in video, according to IAB. These increases come despite evidence that consumers are not spending more total time with video and that millennial consumption of television continues its inexorable decline. What’s more, it is easier today for consumers to curate their own content without recourse to an advertiser-funded media now that free, owned and subscription media are all stealing the other’s lunch.
Where to find consumers with both the time and, importantly, the disposition to engage with brand content and advertising in the summer months, preferably near a point of purchase? The fuel station is a previously overlooked, but relatively obvious, media location. The weekly or twice-weekly fill-up is often a crucial few moments ahead of a grocery or other shopping trip, or journey to an event, QSR stop, picnic or cookout, the beach or any other summer activity.
Brands need to be prepared for the challenges the summer will inevitably bring, whether they’re political or behavioral, or the host of better-known issues like brand safety, fraud or even GDPR; these things will have an impact. The only question you should be asking is, what are you doing to mitigate them? And where is there previously untapped opportunity to find real impact and engagement amongst all the disruption?
Adweek: Marketers Are Getting More Sophisticated in Dissecting Foot Traffic
PlaceIQ launches mobile data dashboard
A few years ago, marketers touted the promise of location-based ads to zap smartphone-wielding consumers with relevant offers and coupons. Now armed with billions of data points, location firms are keen to sell their stats to let brands analyze the data for themselves.
Seven-year-old PlaceIQ is launching a dashboard called LandMark today that allows brands to dig into the firm’s foot traffic data collected from 165 million opted-in consumers. Marketers can zero in on specific markets and locations to see how many people are passing through a store versus going into a competitor’s stores, for example. Or an automaker can track dealership visits to examine consumers who own a vehicle made by a competitor. PlaceIQ began testing the tool with companies including Havas Media, The Media Kitchen, IPG-owned Ansible and Gas Station TV for about a year before making it widely available, said CEO and co-founder Duncan McCall.
“All this data that we’ve been working to make sense of for the last seven years—if you strip it away and say, ‘what is the ultimate value proposition?’ It’s really this data set that connects people, places and things,” he said. “It’s not just mobile. You can apply it across television, across out of home.”
Marketers use PlaceIQ’s software to slice up data by factors like DMA, category of business and date. For example, a marketer could home in on Florida to compare how busy Chick-fil-A and Buffalo Wild Wings restaurants are during spring break. More specifically, a stat called share of visit divides the total number of store visits by the number of locations to look at relative busyness at a store-specific level.
In another example, McCall compared Walmart and Costco’s holiday traffic. Overall, Walmart has more traffic because the brand has more stores, but Costco has a higher share of visits, particularly in the days leading up to big holidays like Thanksgiving or Black Friday when the chain is closed while Walmart remains open. “This allows you to see a very different strategy for Black Friday,” McCall explained. “Walmart wins on Black Friday for busyness but it actually loses a few days before Black Friday—Costco drives everyone into their stores a few days before.”
PlaceIQ is targeting agencies, analytics and data teams at brands and consultancies with LandMark. For media agencies, mobile data helps to plan traditional media. The firm has a deal with comScore that matches up location stats with census data collected from set tops to find people who watch a TV station and then come into a store, for example.
“Agencies are trying to understand, ‘how do I better plan media—do I plan analytics before I plan creative?’” McCall said. “They can query this system and see, ‘I’m winning against these brands and I’m losing against these brands here. Let’s construct a media campaign to heavy up on TV to hit these types of people.’”
Robert Lamberson, director of analytics at Ansible added, “LandMark allows us to understand potential customer segments in unique ways, such as ongoing visitation frequency to one brand against another, average distance traveled by customers to brands and visitation trends down to specific DMAs. These unique insights allow us to inform strategy for our clients on both a national and local level.”
When asked how much of PlaceIQ’s business is based on the more basic tactic of plugging location data into mobile ads, McCall said, “That’s a small part of our business—that’s become a simplistic, blunt instrument but the bigger piece in there is behavioral targeting.”
PlaceIQ faces tough competition in data and analytics as more location-minded firms move in on the space. In March, Foursquare launched a data dashboard and xAd has also recently played up the real-world potential of smartphone-collected stats.
Still, McCall is seemingly confident in his pitch, partly because he believes he’s following a stream of new money that brands are willing to pony up for location-based stats. After years of traditionally outsourcing data and analytics, brands are now staffing up internal teams with data and analytics experts tasked with larger goals of overhauling companies to be more digital and competitive.
“When you [used to] talk to people about foot-traffic analytics, they would say, ‘I have no budget to pay for this. Let me activate advertising and you give me the analytics on the back of advertising,’” McCall said. “It used to be that analytics and research were completely disjointed from advertising. In today’s world, you have that joint. People are spending money on the data and the analytics, but it’s really informing a much greater [type of] intelligent marketing.”
Lauren Johnson, Adweek