“When you combine location’s ability to find and target consumers at the right place and time in local markets with TV’s massive reach and frequency, marketers are able to build and measure highly impactful advertising solutions,” says Eric Hadley, CMO at GroundTruth.
Location-based advertising is inherently “local,” so it’s little surprise that marketers at that level are increasingly looking for ways to imbue traditional ad strategies with geotargeting.
BIA Advisory Services is attempting to quantify that complementary function for location advertising, as the local market consultancy estimates advertisers will spend $20.8 billion in local television and $22.1 billion in location-targeted mobile to target audiences in 2018.
“Today’s marketers increasingly rely on data-infused audience targeting to deliver relevant cross-platform messaging throughout the consumer’s journey to purchase,” said Rick Ducey, managing director, BIA Advisory Services. “TV and mobile are two of the most powerful platforms that audiences are using daily in a unified, not fragmented, experience. Advertisers who integrate audience targeting on TV with location targeting on mobile can achieve an incredibly powerful one-two marketing punch.”
The report comes as SMBs and other local advertising marketers gradually shift their spending priorities and media preferences. In March, a Borrell Associates survey of 1,000 local brand execs said they expect spending to hold steady this year, while two-in-five expect spending will increase by more than 5 percent.
The Borrell report also found that quarter of SMBs spent more money on developing content for web and social media than on paid media, which means that more local budgets will be going to marketing services such as consultants.
At the end of 2015, Borrell found that “local digital” targeted banners comprised 60 percent of the digital revenue, while “untargeted” banners represented 9 percent as paid search took 14 percent and video attracted 4 percent of SMB dollars.
That has paved the way for “native-social” advertising by SMBs, driven largely by Facebook, which has placed a special emphasis on local business marketing.
Still, as BIA’s latest report notes, TV remains the largest media format at the local level, with $27.70 billion being spent on television ads this year, up from $26.2 billion in 2017.
In addition to commanding spending, SMBs also acknowledge TV as providing the greatest ROI among all other media formats, including radio, newspapers, digital in general, and out-of-home.
At the same time, marketers are also gaining assurance that location intelligence adds value to television campaigns by layering in audience-targeting and the ability to tie outcomes to the campaign. As the technology, data and business processes around mobile advertising using location targeting have expanded over the last several years, location targeting provides a performance-based buying model for marketers that ties offline and online media together in an integrated campaign execution, BIA says.
“Location intelligence allows marketers to define actionable consumer personas based on the premise that, ‘where you go is who you are,’ said Eric Hadley, CMO at GroundTruth, who’s quoted in the BIA report. “If you’ve been to a gym, a sporting goods store, and a recreational park within days of each other, it’s a better indicator that you’re a Fitness Enthusiast than any content you may consume but never action upon. Thus, when you combine location’s ability to find and target consumers at the right place and time in local markets with TV’s massive reach and frequency, marketers are able to build and measure highly impactful advertising solutions.”
