Introducing Audience-Based Buying

Today, AdQuick is happy to introduce our new audience-based buying feature. Audience-based buying makes it easy for advertisers to purchase out-of-home media based entirely on their target audience – and save anywhere from 30-50% in the process.

Introducing Audience-Based Buying

Today, AdQuick is happy to introduce our new audience-based buying feature.  Audience-based buying makes it easy for advertisers to purchase out-of-home (OOH) media based entirely on their target audience – thereby simplifying the process of planning and buying OOH media for brand marketers, ecommerce companies, and any advertisers with place-agnostic media strategies.

The best part? Advertisers can expect to save anywhere from 30-50% in the process. Read on to learn more about this exciting new feature…

Location is powerful…

Location can be a powerful marketing signal.  Where people live often says a lot about them, and where people are provides unique context about their needs as consumers.  Not to mention that 90% of retail transactions still happen in the real world, at brick-and-mortar stores. In fact, location is part of the reason why out-of-home is such an effective ad medium...

Except when it’s not.

But, for many advertisers, WHO they reach is more important than where they reach them.  Ecommerce or DTC companies sell their products online and ship them everywhere. And online services or information companies don’t even need to bother with shipping. For these businesses and others, consumer location is really a useful proxy for different signals – like demographic or behavioral attributes and interests.

Take, for example, Tuft & Needle, the game-changing mattress brand (that has brought yours truly endless nights of better sleep). Everyone sleeps. And the vast majority of people sleep on a mattress. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Los Angeles, CA or Chugwater, WY, Tuft & Needle can help you sleep better. Tuft & Needle, therefore, would likely benefit from an audience-based media strategy – such as leveraging demographic or lifestyle audience signals directly, rather than using location as a proxy for those same signals. To date, however, this type of targeting strategy has been pretty difficult to execute in out-of-home advertising.

There are myriad reasons for this difficulty. OOH advertisers typically plan their outdoor ad campaigns unit-by-unit, with location being the primary attribute under consideration.  The OOH advertising ecosystem is fragmented, with many small, local operators controlling the prime ad units in specific markets. And the buying process is often slow, manual, and laborious. Attempting to analyze the audience-specific reach of every OOH ad unit across the country would have been an impossible task…

Until now.

Introducing AdQuick’s New Audience-Based Buying

Our new audience-based buying feature was developed to solve this very problem. “Our brand and agency clients have told us that they are often looking to reach a specific demographic, regardless of where they happen to reside across the country,” said Matthew O’Connor, chief executive officer of AdQuick. “Audience-based buying allows advertisers to buy the best ad units based on their desired target audience, rather than limiting their campaigns to traditional location-by-location buying.”  The end result is that advertisers save time and money.

Audience-based buying enables a new level of campaign efficiency by allowing advertisers to arbitrage the variation in pricing between markets. Consumers live everywhere (especially now, post-COVID), but location is still a key determinant of out-of-home advertising costs.  By opening the aperture from a specific location or market to the breadth of all available OOH media, advertisers can reach their target audience for 30-50% less than when focusing on specific locations.

“When advertisers plan unit-by-unit or confine their campaigns to only a few markets, they’re ignoring over 95% of all of the potential OOH units available,” explains Ted Day-Fratto, director of product at AdQuick. “In contrast, by including the over one million OOH units across the country, they unlock trillions of combinations.  While this would be impossible to plan manually, AdQuick’s audience-based buying automates the selection process so that it becomes fast and easy.”

How It Works

AdQuick has long advised advertisers to branch out and consider “lookalike” mid-sized markets with similar populations as the big markets (we even created a Zip Code Lookalike Tool that helps facilitate market research for data-driven planning). Our new Audience Buying model makes this approach as easy as possible, by allowing advertisers to place buys on their audience targets directly, using a CPM pricing model.  Then AdQuick sources the ad units across all relevant markets.

The process is as simple as one, two, three…

1st) The advertiser identifies the audience they want to reach.  

2nd) The advertiser selects a max CPM, and outlines any important campaign parameters – such as markets, media type restrictions (e.g., only billboards and transit), and flight date ranges.  

3rd) AdQuick plans and executes a media buy tailored to reach the target audience at the lowest price possible.

Like digital, but safer.

In many ways, audience-based buying on OOH is akin to what digital media has been offering for years—without the ad fraud or brand safety concerns that continue to challenge the online advertising space.  “Marketers and advertisers have experienced success with data-driven advertising within online marketing for decades, and our audience-based buying model is a comparable strategy,” O’Connor said. “This model offers peace of mind against the ad fraud and brand safety concerns that continue to be an issue in the online advertising space.”  

By thinking beyond traditional ad-unit-based buys, and opening up buying to audiences, marketers can better engage their most likely current (and future) customers at a much more efficient price.  Audience-based buying makes this easier than ever before.

To learn more about audience-based buying – or AdQuick’s best-in-class OOH buying platform – connect with a member of our team.