Doug Scott contributing writer
• 18 Sep 2009
For those of us in the media business, and particularly those of us in the marketing side of the media business, the adage about consumers being increasingly in control of the media that they consume and the challenges that reality poses for “traditional” marketing channels can only be described as a very well burnished chestnut at this point. Yet its veracity remains unassailable. The positive corollary to this reality is that it has spawned new and ever-evolving ways of doing business and engaging consumers, many of which hold the promise of much richer and more profitable routes to market for marketers that embrace them.
When the newly merged Danoo and IdeaCast recently relaunched as Reach Media Group (RMG) last month, it was an actual and symbolic realization of an important evolution going on in the digital media business. Today, many of the marketing opportunities and practices unlocked by marketers in the online space over the past decade are starting to be realized away from the PC, out in the “real world” (and, importantly, closer to the point of purchase for most products). This is allowing marketers to start to consider how they can utilize the places away from home as part of their marketing plans. Leveraging our digital location-based audience networks, RMG is at the forefront of bringing these opportunities to marketers in the real world.
The digital revolution has created several new realities for marketers. First, consumers have come to expect relevance in all things, advertising included. Whether it is paid search results or an IP-based banner message, if a message doesn’t take into account some information about who you are and what you are interested in, it doesn’t stand a chance.
By design, our networks allow us to know a lot about our audience. We know exactly where you are standing (geography), what you are doing (behavior) and, because of the targeted nature of our venue partners and robust research support, we have excellent insight into who you are (demographics) and what you care about (psychographics). Based on all that information and a highly flexible technology platform, we can deliver ads in an extremely targeted fashion, capitalizing on an environmentally-driven mindset to maximize relevance.
A second reality created by the rise of digital media is an expectation on marketers’ part that any initial impression can immediately be acted on by an interested consumer (“clicked” if you will) and that the action taken by that consumer can be granularly tracked to help marketers measure the ROI of different marketing activities.
Traditionally, it has been difficult to deliver these benefits to marketers in the real world outside of retail marketing (e.g., in-store displays like end-caps) and direct response (it is worth noting that both of these represent enormous slices of the overall marketing pie, highlighting marketer’s desire for these benefits away from home).
The mobile phone, and the Smartphone in particular, introduces some revolutionary new opportunities. Now marketers can drive consumers to immediately engage with a brand on a deeper level and let their personal devices act as the enabler. The challenge for mobile marketers has always been breaking into that heavily protected realm of the personal device.
What digital location-based networks allow marketers to do is to spur consumers to invite them into their personal device and enable them to do so spontaneously. So ultimately, the pairing of the mobile phone and digital location-based networks creates the one-two punch that brings some of the most valued elements of online marketing into the offline world.
For example, RMG enables mobile content downloads, mobile coupon delivery, links to WAP sites and any number of other mobile interactions through our networks, allowing consumers to “click” messages they encounter in the real world and enabling marketers to track that with 100 percent accuracy. We have a saying around RMG that the “mobile phone is our best friend.”
As with all evolutions, there are elements of the new entity that are even stronger than what came before. Digital location-based networks like RMG’s can go one step further than the traditional online space by leveraging the fact that our audience is “on the path to purchase” and, in some cases, is at the point of purchase itself for many physical goods.
This may sound obvious, but it has huge implications. I was speaking with a senior executive from Google recently and they noted that advertisers have told them that, while they love the relevance and accountability of Google’s advertising products, Google will never receive more than about 20 percent of the potential advertising dollars available (not that that’s not a nice chunk of change or anything!) until they can take the qualities that make Google great and extend those out into the real world. This is one of the reasons you see so much focus on location-based initiatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other online giants.
Any consumer goods marketer knows the power of POS advertising (we used to routinely see doubling of sales volume by simply putting a wine product on display when I was at Diageo) and no matter how much knowledge a consumer heads to a store with after they have done their research online, they can be picked off by timely and relevant messages along the way and once they are in the store itself. A marketer must extend their messaging and presence all the way from initial awareness, along the path to purchase an on through to the point of sale. This can only be done leveraging location-based media.
What all this relevance and targeting and conversion capability means at the end of the day is more efficiency for advertisers and greater consumer satisfaction. Everybody wins. It is the promise of digital realized in the offline world.
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