Yes Virginia, We Are Tracking Your Mobile Phone

So what are some ideas for geofencing?  I ran a campaign in Ohio for a community college.  We geofenced seven universities/colleges with a one mile radius and distributed ads to students in the spring.  The message?  “Take classes this summer at the community college at half the rate of the university.  And all class credits are 100% transferable towards your university degree!” 

If you owned a restaurant and wanted to increase your lunch business, geo-target your competitors and serve up a strong call to action – “Save $Xxx on lunch today!”  The beauty of mobile geo-targeting is that it identifies the mobile device’s location below the zip code level and you can customize the size of the targeting area.  Here is an example of targeting the competition.  Your ads only run in the blue geo-fenced areas of your competitor. 

 

Target an event at the AT&T Center, Sea World, Six Flags, North Star Mall, UTSA, USAA, Valero Texas Open, NBA Finals, Texas vs. Baylor.  Thousands of people gathered at a single event makes a great opportunity to reach an unique audience all at one time.  “Leaving Sea World and looking for a great meal?” 

I have a client with an interesting opportunity.  While they are a market leader, they are in an industry plagued by a constant need to hire new employees to handle the increase in business.  Since they need employees with a particular skill, geofence the competition with a “Now Hiring” campaign. 

Targeting Based on Location History.  Smart phones today track where you use them and stores the data for 60 days.  Don’t believe me?  On your iPhone, view Settings, Privacy, Location Services and scroll to the bottom to System Services and select Frequent Locations.  At the bottom of this screen it will show you where you have been using your phone – talk, text or data – for the previous 60 days.   

If you sold automobiles, would you like to target people who have visited three or more competitors in the previous 60 days?  The only people who visit auto dealers this frequently are probably in the market for a new car.  We can target these individuals using their location history. 

For an auto repair company, we are targeting high mileage drivers by identifying individuals who filled up at gas stations 5 times or more in the previous 60 days within their 3 mile trade area.  

A pizza company used the weather activated feature by outlining their delivery area in advance.  When it started raining, they advertised “Stay inside.  We will bring dinner to you.”

How about a campaign that takes advantage of our ability to dynamically change the ad based on your current location?  For a food manufacturer we suggested an ad that changes the closer the individual is to the store selling the product.  “Only one mile to Bob’s market!”  As the prospect gets closer to the store the ad dynamically changes to “Only ½ mile to Bob’s Market!”  “Only 500 yards to Bob’s Market!”  Add in a mobile landing page with two buttons.  Button one outlines the step by step directions to Bob’s Market.  The second button offers a 50 Cents Off Coupon.  Simply press the button and the coupon image is saved to your photos folder on your phone.  Then you just show your coupon photo to the cashier! 

And lest we forget, this mobile device is also a phone, so for many clients, a “click to call” button is perfect. 

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."

    Carl Bard

 

Surrounding Your Prospects With Mobile Love

Digital Marketers

“The very best marketing comes from observing consumer behavior and inserting your message into their behavior.”

In August of 2013, eMarketer.com confirmed what we already suspected.  “The average adult will spend over 5 hours per day online, on nonvoice mobile activities or with other digital media this year, eMarketer estimates, compared to 4 hours and 31 minutes watching television.”  “Time spent with mobile has come to represent a little more than half of TV’s share of total media time, as well as nearly half of digital media time as a whole. The bulk of mobile time is spent on smartphones, at 1 hour and 7 minutes per day, but tablets are not far behind.”

So how do we surround our prospects with love?  Mobile Geofencing.  Also known as Location Based Mobile Advertising, the use of a prospect’s physical location to serve relevant ads is exploding.  Geofencing is when you use location to define a distribution area for targeted advertising and believe me, accuracy matters.

There are two ways to target a prospect on their mobile device.  One method uses zip codes as the targeting center.  When they geofence a location, they use the geographic center of the zip code as the assumed location for center of the fence and measure and distribute ads out from this center point.   So if you are a restaurant wanting to attract customers with a lunch time campaign, your target radius may be one mile.  If your targeting provider uses zip/code tower method, you could be spraying a significant portion of your messages to mobile users literally miles from your location.

The technology licensed by PNS Digital is much more accurate.  Our program has mapped the U.S. into 100 meter by 100 meter grids using true lat/long locations.  We know we can target individuals inside of 100 meters from their exact location.  And targeting does not have to be a radius.  We can target based on a variety of geographic factors.  We can also target consumers based on a variety of demographic factors (like Households with income +$75,000, ethnic diversity, average amount spent of healthcare) and travel history (like Average number of visits to Fast Food restaurants). 

The other consideration in mobile targeting is the distribution network that your ad will be seen across.  PNS Digital has access to more than 8,000 mobile sites and mobile apps, including ESPN, MovieTickets.com, NPR News, Accuweather and Angry Birds, reaching 70 million monthly users.  

True geofencing allows you to customize the area to be geofenced.  Most common is the radius, but you can define almost any unit of geography – like a neighborhood.  Here are the three most common forms of geofencing:

Real time proximity to an advertiser – is the prospect across town or across the street?

Real time proximity to an event or location – AT&T Center, Fiesta, Sea World, North Star Mall, UTSA, USAA,

Targeting based on location history – We are back tracking like the NSA, but your smartphone tracks where you have used it for the previous 60 days.

One of the steps in running a geofencing campaign is to determine how many weekly impressions are available.  Once you determine the targeting parameters – like a one mile radius, 500 meter radius or a neighborhood, we will run an “Available Impressions” report to show you how many weekly impressions are available within the fence.  This will help with budgeting and estimating the Share of Voice costs.   

Next week I will share with you some ideas on how to use the technology of mobile geofencing.  As always, let me know if you have any questions! 

Do People Really Watching Video on a Mobile Phone?

Recently a client asked me, "Do people really watch video on a smartphone?  Maybe kids, but certainly not people the age of my clients."  

 

Sorry, but the answer is yes they do.

 

Below is information from an article on eMarketer.com on this topic.  It is dated Q2 2012, so I imagine the numbers have continued to grow.

Among other findings:

• “The growth of the mobile video audience is impressive. eMarketer expects the number of smartphone video viewers in 2014 to hit nearly 87 million, or more than one-quarter of the total US population.”
• “In Q2 2012, the average US mobile subscriber spent 5 hours and 20 minutes per month watching video on a mobile phone, according to Nielsen.”
•  “Mobile video advertising serves several potential objectives and offers a number of possible benefits for marketers, including: It cuts through the clutter.”
• “Multitasking is the enemy of branding. The requirements for branding include full-screen, immersive content,” said Ujjal Kohli, CEO at Rhythm NewMedia. “The stunning thing about tablets and smartphones is that somehow these systems have been designed to single-task when video is played. And it’s full-screen.”

As you can see in the chart below, the “average” consumer spends 5 hours and 20 minutes per month watching video on a mobile phone.  And while consumers ages 12-17 age lead the way with 7 hours 10 minutes per month, every age group admits to spending time watching video on a mobile device.  This research is one of the reasons we are streaming our newscasts online. 

 

“The very best marketing comes from observing consumer behavior and inserting your message into their behavior.”

Fellow Marketers

In case you missed it, eMarketer.com posted a great story this week.  I have included it below.

As you know, I am a fervent believer in digital marketing.  But I also know that the power of TV is still undeniable.  While the gap is closing (TV will represent 38% of media spending in 2014 versus 28% for digital), TV still makes up a large portion of the average consumers media consumption every day.  And “the very best marketing comes from observing consumer behavior and inserting your message into their behavior.” 

This means that the very best advertising should look at the broad spectrum of consumer behavior and match your advertising plans across as much of the behavior as you can afford. The most successful campaigns don’t use digital.  They don’t use TV, or radio or print.  They use a combination of media to match the consumer’s behavior.  Synergy.  Convergence.  The sum of the parts....  This is why there is growing research that shows the best way to reach your target consumer is to run the same message across TV and digital, same message at the same time. 

Before you read the article below, here is a link to a great, free online tool.  StatsCrop.com.  Simply type in the url of the web site you are researching and StatsCrop will return a wealth of information about the web site.  Pages of information.

Advertisers Blend Digital and TV for Well-Rounded Campaigns

TV’s vast reach is part of appeal for digital advertisers

TV ad spending will grow at a fairly steady single-digit pace over the next several years. The growth rates are not exciting, but they are impressive given the sheer size of the market, according to a new eMarketer report, “US TV Ad Spending: Factors Shaping Today’s Television Market.”

TV will remain the dominant advertising channel, making up 38.1% of total media spending in 2014, and spending on the medium will continue to outweigh that of the nearest competitor—digital—through 2017, albeit with an increasingly narrower gap, until the balance tips to digital in 2018.

Numerous factors point to TV’s continued value to brand advertisers. These include TV’s sheer reach, the power and impact of big-screen advertising, and the predictability of TV’s audience.

Perhaps the clearest sign that digital and TV ad spending are not significantly cannibalizing each other is attitudinal: More and more marketers see the different channels as supplementing each other for a well-rounded campaign. For example, a September 2013 study from Forrester Consulting and Videology found that 52% of media companies, 68% of advertisers and 69% of ad agencies expected agencies to plan video ad campaigns holistically across all viewing platforms.

A September 2013 survey from Advertiser Perceptions suggested one reason for this approach. While 56% of TV ad buyers liked the idea of digital video ad convergence because it would give them a missing piece—digital’s better targeting and more robust metrics—54% of digital ad buyers looked to holistic advertising to gain more of TV’s core strength—vast reach.

TV scales for brand advertisers in ways that digital cannot (yet) match, giving them predictable results for their investments. Consistency on television can help it outstrip other media for gaining ad dollars.

Finally, TV ads tend to influence audiences more than ads in other media, providing impact along with reach and scale. The basic way to define such impact is the capacity to create a consumer or change consumer behavior.

Most audience members concur. In an August 2013 survey from AYTM Market Research, 83.7% of US internet users said TV commercials were the most effective form of advertising.

Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Advertisers-Blend-Digital-TV-Well-Rounded-Campaigns/1010670#PsyiMTtAbQlv7Uxg.99