oOh! Media debuts category data-driven media planning tool

Targeting audiences by category and buyer insights is becoming a reality across oOh! Media’s out-of-home network from this month after the media company announced its new data-driven planning and delivery tool.

The ASX-listed out-of-home provider this week debuted Smart Reach, allowing advertisers to target 500 pre-determined audience groups as well as bring their own audience categories to oOh!’s 35,000-strong OOH network.

The offering is the culmination of four years of work and incorporates 2 trillion external and internal data points relating to buyergraphic, psychographic, consumer behaviour and demographics. It also includes trip analytics data across 70,000 geographic areas, along with journey, seasonality, location and spend data relating to movement. In all, oOh! cited 3 million daily geographic signals, 2.5 billion annual banking transactions, 18 million weekly journeys and 14 million exclusive buyergraphics in the mixing pot.

To do this, oOh! is tapping its exclusive OOH partnership with data analytics consultancy, Quantium, along with Australia’s largest property data provider, CoreLogic. It’s also brought in mobile network data, working with other partners such as D Spark. Quantium clients can also bring in their own pre-determined audience categories as part of a Smart Reach buy.

CEO of oOh!, Brendon Cook, described the new offering as the most robust data grouping by location anywhere in the world.

“It’s a big statement but it’s factual,” he told journalists during a media briefing. “Smart Reach is about delivering for advertisers and reaching more people at locations with accurate, robust data.

“As a company, we realised reach and frequency aren’t enough of a measure. When you use clean data, we see great work. But we knew that wouldn’t be accurate in a location-specific world and the future.”

The group is claiming an average of 25 per cent greater audience efficiency via Smart Reach based on a sample of 4000 campaigns, current versus new, and against a benchmark versus optimised run.

To support the data-driven offering, oOh! has been working with marketing mix modelling firm, Analytics Partners, on research investigating OOH in the wider media context and as a complement to other media channels, as well as the role of creativity and category insight plays in successful OOH activations.

In a presentation to the industry, Analytics Partners leader, Paul Sinkinson, reported a combination of digital, out-of-home and TV advertising in tandem delivers the most optimum results for brands, with a 27 per cent increase on top of the ROI delivered by each medium separately. The group’s research found if you took out TV but left OOH alongside a digital media campaign, advertisers would see a 21 per cent drop-off in returns. Without OOH, this falls to 50 per cent.

In addition, for campaigns with less than $1 million budgets, it’s the combination of digital and OOH delivering to best returns (139 on the ROI index), Analytics Partners found. The research also claimed using 3-4 types of OOH was the most effective ways of running campaigns at the same budget point (129 – 131 on the ROI index).

Analytics Partners also showed numbers that suggested a category buy approach to OOH performed at double the efficiency of a standard demographic buy.

In a real-life example with a streaming video on-demand provider, oOh! said it was able to identify 1.4 million additional people, or 32 per cent on top of the traditional demographic brief, thanks to its new buyergraphic data capabilities.

“With Smart Reach, if an advertiser wanted to target audiences based on their behaviour – for example, those who frequent entertainment precincts – we are able to identify the areas people came from to attend the event, how they got there and where they went afterwards to target those audiences across our locations,” Ooh! chief customer officer, David Scribner, said.

Cook said oOh! will continue to support the existing MOVE recency and frequency data sets but said such an approach was now a base line for OOH.

“We need data that goes further and delivers better efficiency around audiences to deliver the returns we know OOH can deliver,” he said.

Scribner added oOh! would shortly have common metrics across all 10 OOH channels off the back of Smart Reach.

Smart Reach is now available across larger billboards, and will roll out across ooH! bus shelters from this month, followed by rail assets in October. Both were acquired by ooH! as part of its $570 million purchase of Adshel, which closed last October.

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, follow our regular updates via CMO Australia's Linkedin company page, or join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia.