Offline attribution has been one of the most important and top-of-mind topics in the world of local media and advertising over the past few decades. And the topic’s continued volume levels tell us that it remains an unsolved problem. There’s been lots of progress, but still plenty of headroom.
For those just joining the Localogyverse, what we’re talking about here is attributing real-world transactions to the marketing efforts that influence them. It’s still a challenge because there’s no discernible click stream like we see on the interweb… It’s a phygital and convoluted path to purchase.
Of the many and growing media that reside in that path-to-purchase (search, social, AI engines, etc), digital out of home advertising (DOOH) is one influential format. In an attribution sense, it carries pros and cons. It’s less measurable (con), but it’s often in high-intent proximity to store aisles (pro).
To address the analog challenges of DOOH, there have been clever attribution mechanisms devised, such as tracking the aggregate movement of mobile devices to connect the dots between DOOH impressions and subsequent store visits. This can be anonymized in ways that make it privacy-friendly.
Naming Names.
With that backdrop, GroundTruth advanced the ball this week for its ongoing offline attribution endeavors. It’s long been a leader in this area, including leading the way in some of the above DOOH attribution efforts historically. It’s been working on this problem for about 20 years.
Its latest breakthrough involves integration with Place Exchange. For those unfamiliar, Place Exchange is an independent supply-side platform (SSP) that’s prevalent in the DOOH world. It offers programmatic advertising for premium DOOH inventory, and it does so at an extensive scale – key for any SSP.
With this integration, GroundTruth can now beef up the campaign capabilities and optionality that it offers to its brand advertisers. Joining its networked coverage across mobile, desktop, CTV, direct mail, and audio, it now has a more extensive network of premium DOOH inventory to offer.
To name names, Place Exchange’s network includes Outfront, Lamar, Captivate, and GSTV. These are spread across coveted locales for targeted campaigns, including airports, malls, billboards, convenience stores, commercial buildings, entertainment venues, gas stations, street furniture, and more.
One-Two Punch
The way this will integrate specifically is that GroundTruth customers can plan and activate DOOH campaigns directly in the GroundTruth Ads Manager platform. Positioning in Ads Manager also means that users can run DOOH campaigns through GroundTruth’s reporting suite for store visitation analytics.
This direct integration should boost traction because the new capabilities happen in a familiar place for GroundTruth customers. Morevoer, the cross-pollination of these new capabilities with GroundTruth’s reporting suite means that it’s bringing a level of attribution to DOOH that it couldn’t achieve on its own.
This also presumably means (our speculation) that the integration will elevate GroundTruth’s analytics across the board. In other words, it will now have more data running through its system, which engenders more accurate and robust attribution analytics in its platform. This is a game of both quality and quantity.
Meanwhile, the integration is already bearing fruit. In a campaign with CPG brand belVita, GroundTruth ran a combination of DOOH and mobile ads, which drove 221,000 in-store visits in one month – a 3.44 percent visitation rate. This immediately speaks to the one-two-punch of DOOH & mobile.
Header image credit: Kate Trysh on Unsplash
