In today’s outcomes-driven ad market, out-of-home (OOH) media is still playing catch-up with digital-native channels in the measurement race.
The pressure on OOH marketers to prove outcomes is growing, said Ginny Deitchler, SVP of strategic growth and partnerships at OOH specialist agency ODN. This pressure has grown more acute, she said, as mobile location data-based measurement ties physical store visits to ad exposure.
However, advertisers have always been reticent that the speed of performance data from OOH campaigns lags behind other media channels. Most OOH platforms have post-campaign reporting that takes weeks to put together, Deitchler said. This, in turn, prohibits mid-flight campaign optimization.
That’s why Clear Channel Outdoor announced Thursday its new Inflight Insights feature for its RADAR measurement platform. Clear Channel gets regular data insights from about 130 million mobile devices whose users have opted into sharing location data, said Dan Levi, EVP and CMO at Clear Channel.
The new product provides advertisers weekly, mid-flight reports on outcomes driven by Clear Channel’s OOH inventory. Previously, Clear Channel only offered post-campaign reporting, typically delivered eight weeks after the campaign had run.
Modernizing OOH measurement
Clear Channel released its mid-flight analytics to meet digital marketers’ “expectation of insights, speed and being able to be nimble in the marketplace,” Levi said.
Timely campaign measurement also aligns OOH media with the real-time feedback loop advertisers are accustomed to with online display and video, Levi said.
The near immediacy of campaign measurement, he added, should help convince a wider range of outcomes-focused advertisers that OOH deserves a place in their media mix. Clear Channel also wants to help more regular OOH advertisers prove they should devote larger budgets to the channel.
With its data graph, Clear Channel can observe whether a person came into proximity of its OOH inventory based on a mobile device ID, then recognize that device when, say, it’s identified at a store for a retailer or fast-food chain that placed the ad. Clear Channel works with SafeGraph for location data, as well as a rotating cast of other data providers to track store visits. Clear Channel also has ID graph integrations with Experian and TransUnion.
The audience graph integrations give Clear Channel a sense of where some users live, Levi said, which helps illustrate how far people will travel to visit a store after seeing an ad. According to Levi, this optimization signal encourages advertisers to cast a wider net for OOH buys, rather than focusing on screens and billboards practically within sight of their stores.
Innovation out of home
So what’s changed now, to allow or incentivize Clear Channel to provide more timely campaign reporting?
Part of it comes down to how the RADAR platform, which launched nine years ago, was designed to match data from third-party providers to Clear Channel’s first-party data, Levi said. That set a foundation for matching signals in closer to real time, he said.
Clear Channel has also been investing in data engineering and ad tech talent for the past several years, Levi added. That eventually put the company in a position to do what it had already been doing on the measurement front faster and more frequently.
ODN was a beta tester for the new Inflight Insights feature, for a campaign it ran on behalf of a brick-and-mortar grocery retailer that also has on-premises gas stations. The eight-week campaign promoted the retailer’s loyalty program to audiences in the San Francisco Bay area.
Clear Channel is only now getting the data out fast enough for mid-flight retooling. During the beta program, Deitchler said, the timeline for reporting was reduced down from eight weeks post-campaign to four.
ODN is using that reporting data to inform the retailer’s next OOH campaign for a loyalty program in the Colorado market. That campaign flight will last 10 months, in part because the performance data from the Bay area campaign convinced the brand to commit to a longer activation, Deitchler said.
The brand is also running OOH ads across a wider radius, rather than targeting screens close to its stores, she said, because the previous campaign reporting showed a higher-than-expected willingness for audiences to travel long distances to the stores.
The Colorado campaign will also involve optimizing targeting and creative to align with key shopping moments and holidays, Deitchler said. For example, in the previous campaign, ODN saw ads driving more in-store visits on Tuesdays. So, for this subsequent campaign, ODN is looking at ways to change up the creative messaging and targeted locations to drive store visits on Tuesdays in particular.
But measuring store visits is just one aspect of measuring campaign performance.
Clear Channel’s next move, Levi said, will be to use its ID graph integrations and other data partnerships to account for how OOH ads affect users’ online behavior and brand awareness.
OOH advertisers can already tie ad exposure to site visits and model online conversions with third-party measurement platforms, ODN’s Deitchler said. But, she added, having that conversion data available mid-flight would be a game changer.
