6 min read 
Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising remains one of the most impactful ways to capture consumer attention. Whether through billboards, transit ads, or digital screens, OOH reaches audiences in their everyday environments, making it an essential part of any marketing strategy. However, as the marketing landscape becomes increasingly data-driven, the need for more targeted and effective OOH campaigns is greater than ever.
This is where location intelligence comes into play. By harnessing the power of data, marketers can enhance their OOH efforts with precise targeting, real-time optimisation, and improved return on investment. Location intelligence allows brands to go beyond traditional methods, enabling them to reach the right audience at the right time and place. In this blog, we’ll explore the crucial role of location intelligence in modern OOH advertising, providing actionable tips and best practices for integrating location intelligence into your strategic OOH planning, ensuring that your campaigns are not only seen but also resonate with your target audience.
Location intelligence, powered by movement, audience, and spatial data, is transforming Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising. By analysing how consumers navigate cities, advertisers gain valuable geo-behavioural insights that drive more strategic ad placements. This approach allows for more informed decisions, targeting high-traffic areas that deliver the best results.
With location intelligence, advertisers can refine their targeting and customise their messaging, placing ads in locations frequented by their ideal customers for more engaging campaigns. Additionally, real-time tracking and optimisation keep campaigns effective by enabling swift adjustments to maximise impact. Overall, integrating location intelligence into OOH advertising not only boosts campaign performance but also forges a stronger connection between brands and their audiences.
Movement data, audience data, and spatial data provide unique insights that, when combined, create a comprehensive understanding of consumer behaviour and empower advertisers to create more targeted, effective, and contextually aware OOH campaigns. It is essential to ensure that the data is 100% privacy-safe, collected with explicit user consent and upholds consumer trust.
Movement data
Movement data, derived from mobile location signals, reveals consumer movement patterns of their daily journeys and destinations. For OOH campaigns, leveraging this data allows advertisers to identify high-traffic areas for optimal ad deliveries. This ensures maximum visibility and engagement, for example during daily commutes or visits to specific retailers and other points of interest.
Audience data
Audience data offers a detailed understanding of consumer intent. Data is combined with digital identifiers to create precise audience segments, allowing advertisers to tailor messaging based on demographics, interests, online behaviour, brand affinities, and purchase intent. This precision ensures that ads are relevant and resonate with the intended audience.
Spatial data
Spatial data connects offline data to specific geographies, ensuring ads are strategically placed and contextually relevant. By linking geo-spatial data to points of interest, weather conditions, census indicators in specific neighbourhoods, and more, spatial data helps advertisers understand consumers’ surroundings at the real-time moment of the ad impression.
Audience segmentation
Effective audience segmentation is key. By leveraging location intelligence, advertisers can segment audiences based on their movement patterns or purchase intent, and determine the concentration of target groups in specific areas. Tools like Adsquare’s audience scoring use index values to compare the concentration of a target group around different OOH or retail locations, ensuring that ads reach the most relevant audience. These techniques help refine targeting strategies, making campaigns more precise, effective and impactful.
Site selection and mapping
Selecting the right site for OOH placements is another critical step. Location intelligence enables advertisers to identify high-impact inventory by analysing factors such as audience concentration, audience penetration, and exposure rates. By using advanced mapping tools, planners can visualise and compare different locations, ensuring that the chosen sites align with the campaign’s objectives. This data-driven approach allows for optimal site selection, maximising the effectiveness of OOH advertising.
Creative optimisation
Location intelligence also plays a key role in creative optimisation. By understanding the geo-contextual insights of each OOH location, advertisers can tailor their creative content to resonate more effectively with the local audience. For example, if you’re an airline running a special fare promotion for your network of destinations, you can leverage weather condition data to add resonance to your OOH campaigns. By running variations of creative highlighting beach destinations vs major city destinations based on the temperature and precipitation levels in your relevant geos your message will speak strongly to the audience of travel enthusiasts passing by your ad. This targeted approach highlights how customised content, informed by audience and location intelligence, can successfully enhance engagement and campaign effectiveness.
Measurement and attribution
Finally, measuring the impact of OOH campaigns allows for a more comprehensive evaluation of success. Best practices include using dashboard tools to monitor visits by day and time, calculate the frequency of returning visitors, and analyse catchment areas on a postal code level. This data not only helps in assessing the effectiveness of current campaigns but also informs future strategies by identifying geographical white spots, establishing continuous improvement in OOH advertising efforts.
While location intelligence offers significant advantages in OOH advertising, it also presents unique challenges that advertisers must carefully navigate. One of the most pressing concerns is data privacy and compliance, upheld with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Advertisers must ensure responsible data handling and work only with trusted partners that adhere to privacy regulations.
Another challenge is maintaining data accuracy and quality. Reliable insights depend on high-quality data, but inconsistencies or inaccuracies can undermine campaign effectiveness. To address this, it’s essential to work with trustworthy data partners who have a proven track record of delivering accurate and reliable information. Advertisers should be diligent in vetting their data sources to ensure that their location-based strategies are built on a solid foundation.
Finally, integrating location-based OOH with other marketing channels is vital for creating a cohesive brand experience. To ensure that location-based OOH efforts align with broader marketing strategies, advertisers should confirm that OOH placements are integrated with overall campaign goals and messaging. By maintaining a unified approach across all channels, advertisers can maximise campaign efficiency and deliver a seamless message to their audience. Additionally, this integration provides an opportunity for cross-channel measurement, allowing for accurate evaluation of the campaign performance per channel and ensuring a consistent brand experience across all channels.
As we’ve explored, location intelligence has become an essential tool in modern OOH advertising, offering enhanced targeting, precise site selection, creative optimisation, and robust measurement capabilities. By leveraging these insights, advertisers can significantly boost the effectiveness of their campaigns, delivering the right messages to their target audiences.
Looking forward, the role of location intelligence in OOH will only grow, with advancements in data analytics and technology driving even more refined strategies. Advertisers who integrate these insights into their OOH planning will be better positioned to succeed in an increasingly competitive landscape.
To stay ahead, we encourage you to explore and integrate location data into your own OOH strategies. Leverage Adsquare’s Activation solutions and OOH planner to harness the full potential of location intelligence in your campaigns. The future of OOH is data-driven—don’t miss out on the opportunity to lead the way. Fill out the form below for more information on how Adsquare can enhance your DOOH strategy.