Dstillery and Captivate Partner to Go Beyond Location-Based Targeting

Audience targeting is getting smarter, and reaching new customers ideal for a given brand’s campaign is getting more feasible thanks to a partnership between location-based digital video network Captivate and marketing intelligence firm Dstillery.

The partnership, announced Tuesday, leverages Dstillery’s predictive technology to help Captivate’s digital video network reach more relevant audiences. The companies are using mobile location data combined with customers’ web browsing activity and data to pinpoint what audiences are exposed to campaigns in Captivate buildings.

Michael Guzewicz, Business Development Manager at Dstillery, told Street Fight via email that where someone goes in the physical world is not completely indicative of who they are. 

“For example, a marketer who is trying to reach a healthy eater might want to target people who are going to gyms or Whole Foods,” Guzewicz says. “Going to either of these locations doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going after a healthy diet. I, for one, go to the gym multiple times a week but happily eat chocolate chip cookies anytime I can get my hands on them. However, one who is visiting websites related to healthy eating gives us more confidence that we are indeed targeting people who want a healthy diet.”

Because of the amount of data that Dstillery has, the company could, for example, tell Geico which buildings are over index for motorcycle owners versus boat owners, an insight that would allow the insurer to tailor the creative it runs in each building.

Analyzing the behavior of audience browser activity can help marketers find very specific types of consumers, such as people looking for investment advice, or NBA fans or credit card researchers, says Neil Shapiro, VP of digital sales at Captivate.

“It also helps us find harder-to-reach, more specified audiences like IT Decision Makers,” Shapiro says. “There aren’t really any location-based signals that can help us find this audience, but browsing behavior can help serve as the seed data for modeling out that audience. And to take it one step further, if we can pixel a client’s site, we can now model an audience based on the actual visitors to a specific website, import that data into our planning tool, and then target a Captivate campaign based on the buildings that have the highest concentration of the people who look like the visitors to a partner’s site.”

“Marketers have seemingly unlimited media choices for reaching consumers today, making it incredibly important that they target their messages as precisely as possible,” said Evan Hills, VP of strategic partnerships at Dstillery, in a statement. “Out-of-home is a powerful traditional channel made all the more impactful in the digital age, thanks to the availability of targeting signals.”

The data-driven targeting will also enable more specific measurements to be taken, showing incremental website traffic that has been driven by exposure to Captivate campaigns, and facilitating more data points to be used in future targeting.

With the new partnership, Captivate and Dstillery are innovating beyond a marketing reliance on location data, taking the location-based marketing game to the next level by supplementing it with additional analytics.  

“Location data is now table stakes in the digital-out-of-home world, but our partnership with Dstillery takes this capability to a new, deeper level,” Shapiro said. “By utilizing this scale of targeting, we can now find hard-to-reach audiences that can’t be identified based on location data alone.”

This alliance provides Captivate’s advertising partners with the ability to target campaigns based on consumer activity at work and within the Captivate Class A buildings that provide an ideal audience for each individual brand. The partnership also improves possibilities in the realm of attribution.

“By working with Dstillery to measure website visitation driven by Captivate campaigns, we can now offer another important form of attribution for our partners. We’re excited about using data-driven targeting to identify hard-to-reach B2B consumers, amplify B2C objectives, and provide measurable results for our clients,” Shapiro said.

April Nowicki is a staff writer at Street Fight.