Imagine taking a ride in a taxi and seeing one geo-targeted ad for a retailer when you pass its location in a strip mall and another for tickets to an upcoming concert as you drive past an arena.
Dynamic locations haven’t been part of programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) to date. Most DOOH targeting solutions are designed around displays that remain in a fixed location – think digital billboards, kiosks and the like.
But the rise of mobility media, which includes ads shown to passengers in buses, rideshare vehicles and taxis, as well as ads mounted on top of them shown to passersby, opened up an opportunity for a more dynamic approach. If location could be updated programmatically, marketers could target their ads based on where a vehicle is located at a given time.
With its new geospatial ad units, programmatic OOH SSP Place Exchange built a programmatic way for marketers to serve their ads across any mobility media inventory located within a particular geographic location.
The company announced Tuesday it is rolling out geospatial ad units for all of its mobility media partners, including Firefly, Curb, Lyft Halo, Uber OOH, Octopus, Road Runner Media and others. The inventory is available to purchase via open web programmatic, private marketplace (PMP), programmatic guaranteed or direct IO.
“Most SSPs like us have been bolted on to DSPs that still think screen-based, so you can only register one [vehicle-mounted] screen to one location,” said Nick Bennett, SVP Partnerships at Place Exchange. Typically, vehicles would be registered to the location they operate out of, like a garage or dispatcher, without any regard for where the vehicle travels during the course of the day.
The geospatial ad units instead use the H3 hexagonal geospatial indexing system – the same location-based indexing system used by rideshare apps like Uber to determine vehicle locations in real time – to break a larger geographic location (like a city or suburb) into smaller hexagonal areas, typically of a 0.1-mile radius.
To facilitate real-time bidding (RTB), each media owner is responsible for providing location data through Place Exchange’s SSP. For Firefly’s inventory, for example, each vehicle display is equipped with a GPS tracking device that can be used to pinpoint the display’s location at the time of a bid request, said Roey Franco, SVP of product at Firefly.
Each 0.1-mile-radius hex can then be purchased through RTB or as part of a larger media buy. Advertisers can also purchase wider geos that include several of these hexes, like a particular ZIP code or the downtown area of a given city, using Designated Marketing Area (DMA)-based targeting. Or they can purchase according to proximity to a physical location using point-of-interest data derived from a third party like SafeGraph or Google Maps.
Place Exchange claims such geo-based targeting is more privacy-centric than location-based targeting solutions that rely on a user’s device ID. By using the H3 hex-based method instead, ads aren’t served to particular users or particular displays but instead on any screen that enters a given hex. And the company and its media partners can also place restrictions on serving ads near sensitive locations, like schools, houses of worship and medical offices.
“We do negative geofencing, basically,” Franco said. “If there are specific brands that can’t advertise around specific venues, we can omit those.”
The media owners work with third-party mobile measurement companies to calculate how many impressions are available within a given geo at a given time. For example, Firefly gets its impression multiples audited by Reveal Mobile; historical impression multiples are used to set an impression baseline for the company’s inventory, Franco said. The number of impressions can vary by time of day, weather, seasonality and other factors. The more impressions that can be tied to a particular geo, the more in demand that geo is likely to be.
“We deliver to [Reveal Mobile], in real time, our lat-longs for every single vehicle, and they crunch the numbers and estimate the impression multiplier,” Franco said. “We can get [impression multipliers] from a [DMA] market level down to the individual car per hour.”
Buyers can see which seller they’re purchasing inventory from, as well as the location of that inventory at the time of purchase. Their measurement partners can weigh this data against the expected impression multiplier to determine return on ad spend (ROAS).
The setup also supports sellers.json, Bennett said. “The bid request will identify the media owner, and it has lat-long fields, so they know exactly where the asset is and exactly the media they’re purchasing.”
Place Exchange has been testing the geospatial ad unit solution for the past 18 months. After a six-month rollout across its network of media partners, the solution is now live across all of Place Exchange’s DSPs.
Correction 11/29/22: A previous version of this story erroneously said New York City restricts advertisements on vehicles near airports. That reference has been removed.
