Adam’s Blog

SUMMARY:
Display ads that can be customized on the fly to be more relevant to the viewer are more likely to be clicked than generic ads. But customization is not always an option in every marketing plan.
You don’t have to sacrifice reach for customization any more. Find out how an advertising network is helping advertisers create localized ads that can be shown on a national scale.
National brand marketers are in a challenging position, as the power of localized marketing shows positive results. Some marketers need to reach large audiences through nationwide advertising, which makes it hard to localize the ads.
Alistair Goodman, CEO, 1020 Placecast, and his team strive to overcome this challenge–particularly for driving traffic to nearby brick-and-mortar stores. They help marketers run campaigns that are able to detect a consumer’s location and customize the ads to include localized elements.
“An advertiser can run a national campaign but actually create a large amount of local relevance,” Goodman says.
Below, we look at how 1020 Placecast’s localized campaigns work, and how they’re performing for advertisers.
> Identifying Local Targets
When building a campaign, Goodman’s team first asks marketers for a list of the physical store addresses to which they want to drive traffic. The list tells his team which regions to target and localize the advertising for.
The team also asks marketers to profile their target audience for the campaign. Then, the team examines the target regions and pools multiple sources of data to get a better idea of where exactly the target audience likely lives.
Next, given the goals of the campaign, the team can create an ad. The ad will likely have some consistent elements — such as a product image — and some interchangeable elements — such as a city name, local imagery, or the address of a nearby location.
> Location-specific Publishers
Knowing which regions they need to target, the team finds publishers that have localized content for those regions.
“We create a network of publishers that have what we call location-specific content, where we can apply our approach to targeting,” Goodman says.
These publishers might be local classified, news or events websites. Other publishers, such as travel, weather, and real estate sites, operate nationally but deliver localized content. Visitors to these sites identify themselves as either residing in or interested in certain areas.
The team works with these sites to kick start the ad-delivery for the campaigns they build. A visitor to one of the sites could identify themselves as a member of the target region by:

• Entering a departing city on a travel site
• Checking the weather of a certain city
• Accessing any type of region-specific content
• Entering a zip code
• Visiting a site that’s only relevant to one region

Once the publishers pass on that initial piece of data, Goodman’s team is able to infer the person’s location, supplement that information with their other data on that area, and deliver the most relevant ad possible.
- Mobile campaigns
Goodman’s team also works with publishers who have mobile visitors. This allows them to create campaigns for the mobile channel, and it gives them other data about a person’s location via GPS coordinates or cell tower triangulation.
> Building Local Profiles
Goodman emphasizes that his team is taking a different approach in its research. Rather than focusing on building profiles on consumer’s locations and travel habits, they are building profiles on locations.
The more information the team can gather on a specific location, the more they understand certain regions, and the better the can localize the ads.
For example, the team may discover that a site visitor is from a certain neighborhood. Neighborhoods have opaque borders and naming conventions. However, if the team had enough information to correctly determine a person’s neighborhood, its title could be used in the advertising.
> Example of Impact
Goodman’s team recently worked with Avis Rent A Car. The campaign was designed to drive people to Avis’ off-airport locations. The target audience was not frequent travelers, but people who needed a rental because their car was at the mechanic, or who needed a car for the weekend.
They were able to create a national campaign that connected ad viewers with the nearest Avis center. Ads displayed on regular websites encouraged viewers to click to see a map or book a car. Ads displayed on mobile websites encouraged viewers to click to call the nearest Avis center.
The team did A/B testing of the localized ads vs. localized ads. They saw a 50% higher clickthrough rate on the customized Web ads and an 124% higher click-to-call rate on the customized mobile ads, Goodman says.
“When you’re able to develop a relevant message, you’re able to achieve much stronger results,” Goodman says.
Alistair Goodman is speaking at ad:tech Chicago in September.
USEFUL LINKS RELATED TO THIS ARTICLE:
ad:tech
http://www.ad-tech.com/
Avis Rent A Car
http://www.avis.com/
1020 – Placecast
http://www.1020.com/