How Location-Based Technologies Are Creating Out-of-Home Advertising Markets of the Future

Over the last fifteen years, new technological advances have begun to change the nature of location-based advertising and information services. From the simple expediency of ensuring that your chain or sole business appears in popular online map services through to high-tech campaigns around events and happenings, the impetus to leverage a customer's location has gained steady traction in marketing.

The concepts behind smart 'out-of-home' (OOH) marketing techniques are developed and refined by some of the biggest players in marketing. They are backed by forward-thinking municipal authorities around the world, which are increasingly partnering with the private sector to deliver smart city experiences.

The core enabling technologies include proximity communication protocols, which facilitate the flow of location-activated information, and beacons. The latter are devices that can communicate with nearby people and with other beacons in a wider-ranging network.

These are relatively new methodologies that are only now proving their value, robustness, and versatility. So, now is a perfect time to engage in enterprise mobile app development and explore the potential of the 'exterior' marketing experience.

There are a variety of devices and methods capable of engaging with consumer devices such as smartphones, many of which can also work in concert with each other.

Inexpensive and simple to install, beacons are currently the first choice for interactions with consumers. Apple's iBeacon protocol is of great interest for many marketing sectors, since the Apple consumer profile is such a desirable target, However, it is a relatively closed-source solution. At the same time, Google's Eddystone protocol for Android currently represents the direct competition with a visible uptake in its open source offering.

Based on GPS, a geofence defines a sector of land against which to apply rules for location-enabled devices. Governments use them, for instance, to ban drone flights from prisons, while marketing companies employ geofences to delineate areas where a campaign is active—such as a store or open-air event where messages can be pushed to opted-in consumers.

RFID was introduced primarily as a payment method, frequently for transport systems, in the early 2000s. Although it can be retro-fitted for marketing purposes, it has inherent limitations. These include:

• A lack of industry standards
• The tendency for multiple RFID devices to conflict or interfere with each other's operations
• The relatively high upfront cost of the equipment, particularly compared to BLE
• A typically limited catchment field
• No opportunity to personalize RFID (i.e. for a particular time of day)
• A very limited native compatibility in the smartphone market

There are now a large number of scalable, enterprise-grade facial recognition APIs that can be hooked into proximity marketing solutions. Open-source efforts such as OpenCV are joined by semi-open-source industry powerhouses such as Google Cloud Vision, and commercial offerings like IBM Watson Visual Recognition, Amazon Rekognition, Microsoft Face API, and insurgent offerings from Animetrics and FaceX.

In 2015, an innovative campaign to highlight domestic violence brought facial recognition marketing techniques into the news when Women's Aid, a British NGO, created an interactive outdoor display advert featuring a woman with bruises. Facial recognition cameras were set to recognize viewer attention and diminish the injuries as more people looked on and reacted. The campaign's hook was “Don't turn a blind eye to domestic violence” and this inventive spin on new marketing technologies made a notable impact.

Many online resources paint an attractive picture of IoT-based OOH campaigns which effortlessly push promotional messages to consumers based on their location. However, this assumes that your customer has already opted into your marketing system.

Where this isn't the case, an OOH campaign will need to provide value, novelty, and innovation in order to get a non-participating consumer at least initially into the interaction space. You can't offer discounts, deals or other calls to action if you haven't yet been able to open the primary channels for communication with the customer.

It's important for an effective IoT campaign to have more than one possible point of entry (see 'QR codes' above), and to target outlying as well as subscribed consumers via a broad range of location-based technologies and approaches. Pushing messages to converted or semi-converted customers will sometimes reap only limited rewards, and this industry space is currently looking to invent its way past push marketing messages and into more novel and inventive campaign designs.

One appealing approach is to create engaging experiences that make consumers willing to opt in to your framework with experiences that invite curiosity, such as augmented reality (AR) overlays on portable consumer devices.

We've examined the marketing potential of AR in a previous article, and discussed some compelling use cases which encourage consumer adoption of geo-specific campaigns. Those willing to join the vanguard of the coming AR revolution with innovative experiences where the novelty transcends the aim, are set to reap the collateral benefits of opt-in to wider tranches of geo-based brand advertising.

Another possibility is to solve a tiresome everyday niggle with inventive use of near-field technologies. Drinks company Martini took this approach in developing a 'smart' ice-cube that uses BLE and Apple's iBeacon to understand when a customer's drink is finished, and automatically order a refill.

In 2017, wine and sherry manufacturer Barbadillo used an extremely thin NFC-enabled film attached to 126,000 bottles of wine to create 'smart bottles' containing a call-to-action around their competition.

Geoconquesting is a new wrinkle on the long-term commercial warfare between local stores, which has traditionally been dominated by the purchase of diversionary advertising space near the site of the 'enemy'. It's is an aggressive guerilla marketing tactic that seeks to divert potential customers from a competitor's actual location to one's own.

One notable example occurred in 2013 when Guatemalan shoe retailer Meat Pack hijacked former customers who were approaching a rival store. Meat Pack had erected a geofence around the competitor's premises; when the former customer (who by now had opted into Meat Pack's promotional infrastructure) approached the rival store, a gamified promotional ad was sent to the customer's phone offering the maximum of a 99% discount, dropping by 1% every second. The result? 600 customers were poached from the competitor, with 89% the highest discount awarded.

In 2018, fast-food franchise Burger King operated a similar geo-strike against McDonald’s. The 'Whopper detour' campaign generated a reported 1.5 million extra app downloads by targeting the larger chain's nearby stores.

However, the effectiveness of geoconquesting is perhaps best limited to one-off strikes whose inventiveness is likely to generate suitable and welcome publicity. For one thing, your rival could strike back in the long term with equal or greater force; certain campaigns or aggressive actions could provoke legal issues in particular territories or circumstances; end users could learn to game a long-term algorithm in their own favor; and finally, one has to consider the demographic quality of customers so easily appropriated, and the cost of supporting a long-term undercut in a market that may have thin margins.

Geofencing and other established and emerging location-based technologies offer unparalleled opportunities to gather actionable data about your customers' shopping habits when they are in proximity to your store. While these technologies also offer deeper insights into on-premises consumer behavior, OOH campaigns can be equally effective when the goal is conversion or acquisition of a new customer.

To wrap up, these are the key ways to approach OOH marketing:

• Understand your customers' motivations and drives
• Have clear objectives and achievable metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your location-enabled campaigns
• Ensure logic and consistency in campaigns (such as not offering inventory which is out of stock, or channeling customers to a location that is currently closed)
• Finally, have some fun with the amazing possibilities for 'real-world' interactive marketing and analytics, so that this enthusiasm can express itself in enjoyable and rewarding location-based campaigns