Captivate Partners with Location Tech Companies to Deliver Geo-Targeted OOH Ads

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Captivate already has a captive audience. An in-office elevator advertising platform, the company places ads in front of thousands of professionals every day.

“We’re literally locking people in a metal box and giving them a screen to look at,” said Neil Shapiro, the company’s senior vice president of digital and programmatic sales.

But the platform is getting more sophisticated, collaborating with tech-savvy partners to deliver OOH ads based on its audiences’ interests and locations. This year, Captivate announced its “Places” platform, which centralizes its planning and data analytic tools and “puts them in one place for the marketplace,” Shapiro said.

Captivate works with a number of partners to develop an understanding of the audience in each building in which it operates.

One major partner is Dstillery, which offers a Dscover Maps tool that lets Captivate visualize its audiences by geography. Dstillery launched that tool in August, Street Fight previously reported.

“We have giant office buildings that are full of people all day long, letting us tap into all that data that’s already there and put it to work,” Shapiro said.

Using that location-based data has yielded a huge return on investment for some of Captivate’s advertisers. One alcohol brand doubled the visits to bars promoting its new product when it used media on Captivate tagged with the nearest location. And one retailer saw a 41% lift in new store visits from a Captivate campaign.

Shapiro explained how it works. Take, for example, a video game advertiser that wants to run a Captivate campaign. Using data from their partners, Captivate can find their building audiences and overlay that with audiences that have shown an interest in video games.

Once it finds that intersection, Captivate can create a list of some of the company’s 1,600 buildings, selecting ones where its client would reach the most interested audiences.

And Shapiro says they take care to verify that their impressions are delivered. Nielsen audits buildings with Captivate to determine how many people are using the elevators. Another company, LINKETT, uses WiFi sensors to gather data on foot traffic coming in and out of buildings.

The “Places” platform traces the life cycle of a campaign from the initial planning and audience building to delivery, necessary auditing, and ROI measurement. 

“Our continued partnership with Captivate to demonstrate the impact of office advertising to store visitation has proven to be a natural fit,” said David Shim, founder and chief executive officer at Placed in a press release. In March, Street Fight reported that the company had opened up their location analytics platform up to the public for free.

Shapiro noted the importance of its partners in improving how Captivate targets and measures its campaigns.

“We are uniquely positioned in the marketplace,” Shapiro said. “Nobody else does what we do.”

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