MarketingProfs: Five Ways to Reach Your Target Audience With Place-based Digital Video Advertising
This article was originally posted on Feb. 3, 2009 at MarketingProfs.
By Scott Hines
As advertisers continue to look beyond traditional media, such as TV and radio, to reach today’s busy consumer, place-based digital video advertising is coming into its own.
Aimed at consumers when they are out and about, living their daily lives—waiting in line at a coffee shop, pumping gas, working out at a health club, socializing at a bar, or visiting the doctor’s office—this dynamic medium offers great potential to deliver far more targeted, effective brand messages, and in many cases at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.
But with so many diverse opportunities available, what’s the best approach to developing a successful digital video advertising campaign in places people go every day?
Here are five steps that marketers and media planners should follow to take the greatest advantage of this unique medium.
1. Focus on life patterns
This means mapping the behaviors of your target audience based on their daily routines to digital video locations where they work, shop, travel, and socialize.
For example, a digital video campaign targeting “alpha moms” is going to look very different from one targeting college students. To reach busy “alpha moms,” a campaign would include screens in places like the waiting rooms of pediatricians’ offices, gas stations, and supermarkets; to reach college students, a campaign would include recreation centers and student unions on campus, as well as bars, coffee shops, bookstores, and retail locations off campus.
The key here is to map the work, play, and social patterns of the audience you want reach, and then weave a media strategy through the myriad places they frequent daily.
2. Consider the context
The power of digital video advertising lies in its ability to offer a tremendous opportunity to reach people in places where they are more likely to be attentive to relevant brand messages.
There are two key points to consider regarding context.
First, unlike other media, where the rise of digital video recorders or ad blockers enable viewers to easily skip ads altogether, place-based digital video advertising can reach a captive and more receptive audience, particularly in situations where they are waiting for an appointment, waiting in line, or waiting for an elevator to reach the next floor.
For example, the “dwell time” that an individual spends in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room can be as long as 30-40 minutes. Like most people I know, I’m typically bored during a long wait and grateful to have something to entertain or inform me.
Second, consider how to match the attributes of your brand to the places where your audience goes. Think about who owns the space (a cosmetic dentist, a health club, a sports bar?) and the frame of mind of the clientele (are they worried about their teeth, thinking about how to stay healthy, having a few beers with friends?) and tailor your messages accordingly.
Let’s say that your product appeals to a healthy lifestyle. In that case, delivering a message such as “Stay Energized” would work perfectly at a health club, whereas you might want to focus on a message about convenience at a gas station.
Marketers who consider the context will be rewarded with an attentive, engaged audience.
3. Bring your message to life with great creative
Once you have developed your “Big Idea,” place-based digital video advertising offers a rich, vibrant, and cost-effective medium for delivering your message. We are not talking about the million-dollar television commercial, nor are we talking about a static billboard or an Internet ad banner.
Effective place-based digital advertising creative sits somewhere between TV, the Web, and outdoor advertising, leveraging the best capabilities of each of those media. People report that digital video advertising is entertaining like television. They also report that it is informative and relevant like the Web. And people report that with simple typography and imagery along with video and animation, this medium captures their attention like outdoor advertising.
The combination of entertainment, relevance, sight, and motion with contextual relevance is a powerful approach for stopping consumers in their tracks.
4. Leverage existing digital assets
As many advertisers already have an online strategy in place, digital video advertising locations offer a great way to get more “play” out of existing content (such as a Flash movie from a company Web site or user-generated videos) while taking advantage of new, high-impact ways to reach consumers.
Plus, digital content can be changed, refreshed, or customized more easily than other types of creative executions, such as print or broadcast video, allowing you to test your ads and then quickly refine your communication over time as your learn what is working.
5. Create the perception of ubiquity
When consumers see messages in the midst of their daily experiences, the impact can be tremendous. With digital video advertising reaching people in places where they go every day, it is now possible for advertisers to create meaningful moments at a reasonable cost.
Because contextually relevant messages can be mapped to specific behavior patterns, advertisers can appear to be “everywhere” to their target audience, even with a relatively small media buy. That’s because messages can be directed to the venues that truly matter to people—in particular, in places and at times where they are more likely to be open-minded to a message.
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Because place-based digital video advertising builds on the strengths of TV, Web, and outdoor advertising, it can be used either as the primary way to reach your audience or as an extension of campaigns beyond home or work.
Plus, given the cost relative to other media, it is easy to see the ROI that place-based digital video advertising can deliver.
