Aspex Turns to Vistar Media for DOOH Campaign

When Aspex Eyewear Group decided to begin advertising again after many months dormant, executives decided to add digital out-of-home or DOOH to their media mix to support a campaign that launched in February.

“When we decided to come back and reactivate our marketing and advertising efforts, it was great to see how far digital had gone with out-of-home,” said Jenn Larry, Head of Global Marketing for Aspex. “With a lot of new screens and touch points–inside taxis and office buildings and in some of the remote locations as well, it was a perfect integrated approach.”

For the brand’s new campaign in the channel, Aspex turned to Vistar Media, whose proximity targeting capabilities within its programmatic technology for DOOH came in handy. Aspex’s campaign is running across 4,016 screens—2,840 in the U.S. and 1,176 in Canada, including French-speaking regions.

Vistar uses POI (point-of-interest) targeting on OOH screens and leverages data from Foursquare, a location-technology platform.

“We use Foursquare’s POI dataset to get insight into all the locations and the ability to target actually based on selecting a specific dataset,” said Leslie Lee, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Vistar Media. “It’s a very robust dataset and integrated directly with out-of-home media owners. So really, any digital screen that’s out in the physical world we have an integration with and can then identify screens that are within the proximity targeting the client’s want. Radius and parameters are around those points of interest and run media on only those digital screens.”

Tagged “Eyewear that moves with you,” the campaign focuses on Aspex’s TurboFlex® technology and runs in-market through May. Ads are also running online and are a mixture of static banners and video in both media. The still ads show a man stretching wide the frames’ temples.

The video shows a man, clad in all black against a white backdrop, doing body stretches and then cuts to a close-up of the frames. Images of the man and the frames cut back and forth while words flash onscreen: “Revolutionary technology. The world’s first 360-degree rotating hinge. Magnetic clip-on lenses.” And then, the video ends with the words, “TurboFlex Worldwide Patented Technology.” The videos are anywhere between five and 15 seconds in length.

“We are celebrating 58 years as a privately owned family-run company,” Larry said. “We really have driven two key things along the way. One is putting technology at the forefront of developing eyewear. TurboFlex has a 360-degree hinge on the temple, which allows you to literally twist your glasses in half.”

She added that the company strives for innovation and technology in its eyewear at an affordable price. “Somebody will fall asleep or drop and break their glasses or they break their glasses. Prescription frames and lenses are not cheap. We provide something to the market that’s durable and works for kids as well as adults.”

Aspex eyewear is available in more than 20,000 retailers across North America, both at large chains like Walmart and Costco and at independent optical retailers.

Vistar Media is making sure the digital OOH campaign is reaching those large swaths of potential customers.

“The way our POI targeting works is a client would select the points of interest that are relevant for them,” Lee said. “Let’s say they set a target of wanting to run media around a one-mile radius of Walmart locations, for example. We have that data set and are able then to identify all of the digital, and physical screens that are within that one-mile radius. And because those are out-of-home screens, that dataset doesn’t vary, depending on the audience composition.”

Using Foursquare’s POI data set, Vistar identifies the screens to target using a proximity-based strategy. It also uses mobile-location data for audience-based targeting. Both tactics are privacy compliant, Lee said.

She added, “What’s really unique about applying [our] programmatic technology is it allows marketers to identify all of the screens that are within that certain proximity rather than having to contract individually with every separate media owner.”