Bullseye: How event data powers better targeting for OOH advertising

Published on March 03, 2023
Valerie Williams
Content Marketing Manager

Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising is a powerful strategy for reaching consumers in the real world, but it can be a challenge to target the right audience, in the right place, and at the right time. Two major challenges when it comes to placing effective outdoor advertisements include:

  • Timing of ad placements: Advertisements need to be placed at the right time to maximize efficacy. This requires a comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior, the events that influence this behavior, and the timing of these events.

  • Locating your target audience: Without enough information about their target audience's location, interests, and behaviors, outdoor advertising companies may struggle to determine the best places to display advertisements to reach their target audience effectively.

Intelligent event data provides real-world information about events of all sizes happening in specific locations, including:

  • Event category: The type of event, or event category whether it’s concerts, sports, live TV events, conferences, or others

  • Event location: The event’s precise location represented by address, longitude/latitude, or by a polygon representing the area of event impact

  • Predicted attendance: Event volume, or the predicted number of attendees based on venue size, ticketing data, historical data, and more

Access to this level of detail for the precise locations of your billboards, bus shelters, or digital OOH placements can be used to inform media planning and buying decisions – helping advertising companies determine the best times and places to display outdoor media to reach their target audience.

For example, one year during Zurichfest, the biggest public festival in Switzerland, one ad agency used the eye-catching idea to transform a busy crosswalk into a giant order of McDonald’s french fries. This temporary display helped the nearby McDonald's location remain competitive in the face of independent pop-up food stalls for the duration of the festival.

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With insight into when an major upcoming  concert or sporting event is taking place at a certain venue, out-of-home advertisers and media buyers can strategically place outdoor media during the time of the event when attendees are bound to pass by, as well as on their way to and from the event venue. Let’s explore how to replicate this winning formula with three essential ways to use intelligent event data to create better targeted, impactful out-of-home media.

Use event data to unlock better targeting and higher ROI for your clients advertising spend

Major events such as conferences, concerts, expos, sports events, and more – unlock the ability for outdoor advertising companies to make data-driven media planning and strong recommendations to their clients. By using event data to inform OOH media planning, campaigns can be optimized to target areas with high levels of foot traffic during particular periods of time. Here are three ways product managers and media buyers can leverage attendance-based event data to improve media planning for OOH activations:

  1. Identify high-traffic locations: By knowing which events are expected to have high attendance, the brand can target their OOH advertising to the areas around these events to reach a large and engaged audience. Combine this with point of interest (POI) data to understand which places are around these events – specifically location name, category, and lat/long to determine proximity to an event venue.

  2. Improve timing for ad placements: With insight into precise timing of events including predicted end times, the OOH activations can be scheduled strategically to align with when people are likely to be in the area and most receptive to marketing messages. Enable more dynamic OOH strategies with precise timing for events, such as making sure ads are on display only during the duration of the event.

  3. Optimize targeted messaging: Based on the type of event and the demographic of the expected attendees, the brand can tailor their OOH messages to be most relevant and appealing to the audience they want to reach. By understanding the types of events that are likely to attract the target audience, out-of-home businesses can create advertisements with more relevant, impactful messaging.

With intelligent event data informing your media planning and buying, you can optimize advertising campaigns to reach your target audience exactly where they’ll be, at the time they’re planning to be there. Getting the timing, location, and messaging just right for the occasion helps to ensure that your activations for your customers are as visible and memorable as possible to drive the maximum ROI for your ad placements.

How to use events to inform your next out-of-home media campaign

To use intelligent event data effectively, we recommend OOH advertising agencies take a few simple first steps:

Quickly identify high-volume events to target your ads around: Sign up for your free PredictHQ account to upload your locations of interest and see exactly what’s happening around them nearly in real time. This makes it easy to identify prime times and locations to place ads for maximum exposure for your clients. 

Integrate relevant events into your planning: Product managers should regularly check the data and integrate it into existing marketing calendars, as well as their media planning and buying processes. This may include updating media plans based on the information provided by event data, as well as negotiating with media owners and suppliers to secure the best advertising locations and times. You can also leverage existing business intelligence or visualization tools such as PowerBI, Looker, and Tableau to surface intelligent event data and inform your teams of the impact of events.

Whether you're targeting a specific audience or a broader market, event data is key to unlocking the full potential of OOH advertising and delivering better targeted outdoor media. Sign up for your free account today to begin exploring events.