How to Track Mobile OOH Advertising: An Interview with Jonathan Frangakis
Jonathan Frangakis has been a champion of out-of-home / OOH advertising for years. He and his brother Gabe founded an OOH analytics platform called Mira in 2014. Mira was acquired by Reveal Mobile, where he serves as its Chief Commercial Officer.
He gave us insights into the next wave of moving OOH advertising (as in moving vehicles) and how it can be measured.
OOH is one of the oldest ad media and is seen primarily as an awareness-building tool (“one to many”) But now that marketing executives are deeply concerned about ROI, attribution, and trackability, the value of OOH is critically important. Seeing a brand name on a billboard is not enough.
Frangakis believes that OOH is an undervalued channel and that performance measurement is critically important to advertisers.
Add to that the upswing in ridesharing. We are accustomed to jumping into Ubers, Lyfts, and yellow cabs. A whopping 25 percent of the U.S. population uses this form of transportation at least once a month.
So, the billboard is no longer just a sign along the highway. It’s a small screen on top of or inside our rides.
How do multi-location restaurants, retailers, and service businesses capture the eyeballs and wallets of this popular form of transportation — especially in an environment where the audience is captive?
Reveal is focused on what Frangakis calls “location intelligence.” The company’s sweet spots are agencies, brands, and publishers that are looking for outcomes-based campaign measurement and reliable data.
Their 4-prop (proportion) incremental lift analysis is a study that measures how people exposed to OOH advertising are impacted by the messaging they see without using QR codes or other specific tracking mechanisms.
Reveal has a panel of 50M daily active users which they use to understand who was exposed to OOH advertising. They compare it to a control group that mirrors the demographics and device types of those riders.
They then look at the conversion data and pre- and post-behavior of the groups. The hypothesis is that people exposed to in-vehicle advertising are more likely to take action (visit a MULO restaurant or retail brand) than those who did not see ads.
So far, that theory is proven.
Previously, OOH was considered part of the marketing mix, and tracking its impact was virtually impossible.
“OOH is finally getting the credit it deserves in changing shopping behavior,” says Frangakis, citing one study in which a QSR saw a 20+% increase in foot traffic and online orders due to exposure to a moving OOH campaign
Although certain protected business classes — cannabis dispensaries, places of worship, and medical offices — are not included in Reveal’s tracking and reporting metrics (due to consumer privacy issues), other MULO businesses can benefit from the platform’s insights..
Whether consumers are traveling within their home cities or catching a ride on a business or personal excursion, they all come into contact with OOH campaigns. When they aren’t busy checking their phones, they can get recommendations for places to shop and eat that will ultimately drive them to those locations.
The dynamic and trackable small-screen message is rapidly augmenting the static billboard. And marketers can now measure the impact of that medium on consumer behaviors.
*Image Source: iStock.com/MOZCO Mateusz Szymanski
