Hot Trend: Targeted Advertising

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As a brand, it will always pay dividends to see what the latest trends in marketing and advertising are so that you can work out the best ways of reaching your target market. And, if you’re already involved in the use of custom LED displays to market your goods and services, perhaps it’s time to consider focusing on targeted advertising this year.

This is simply advertising that focuses on a variety of traits of a specific consumer, whether it’s sex, age, race, income level, employment, education or something similar. Online, this could be some kind of behavioural variable like purchase or browser history. These days, however, you can really think outside the box and take advantage of the technology available to you to create targeted ads on big display boards at the exact moment one of your customers is passing by.

Don’t believe us? Take a peek at this article in Technology Review that shows you exactly what can be achieved in the 21st century where your targeted advertising is concerned. A new start-up in Russia called Synaps Labs has now brought targeted advertising into the real world incredibly successfully by using high-speed cameras set up near a digital billboard to capture images of passing cars.

The billboard’s machine-learning system can recognise the images from the cameras, identifying the make and model of the cars that the advertiser in question is keen to target. From there, a bidding system chooses the right advert to put up on the billboard as the car drives past.

According to Synaps, a targeted ad on this kind of billboard shown 8,500 times a month will reach the same number of targeted motorists (around 22,000) as a more typical advertisement shown 55,000 times. So as you can see, it could certainly yield serious results if you do decide to market in this way.

It’s also worth looking into tracking people’s behaviours via their smartphones, something that is increasingly coming to the fore these days. Clear Channel Outdoor Americas – which, according to the New York Times, has thousands of billboards all over the US – has now partnered with numerous companies including AT&T to track travel patterns and behaviours through people’s mobile phones.

Data collected will then be aggregated in order to provide advertisers with detailed information about who has been passing their billboards so they can plan out more targeted ads.

Andy Stevens, senior vice-president for research and insights, was quoted by the news source as saying: “In aggregate, that data can then tell you information about what the average viewer of that billboard looks like. Obviously that’s very valuable to an advertiser.”

Of course, there are privacy concerns surrounding this kind of tracking so if you are to engage in it, make sure that you’re as transparent as you can be so that you don’t end up losing followers instead of gaining them.