There are many uses of location in mobile advertising. Increasingly, however, location is being used in the background to identify and qualify audiences and to do behavioral targeting or retargeting. Those tactics are often combined with geofencing for a multi-layered approach to mobile targeting.
One representative illustration of this is a current campaign for Toyota created by Opera Mediaworks and agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA. Opera Mediaworks is the advertising arm of the browser company that was built from its acquisition of ad mediator AdMarvel a few years ago.
The Toyota campaign serves mobile ads with offers to customers using their locations (based on a lat-long). However ads are only shown to qualified audiences within a certain proximity of local Toyota dealers. The ads feature different incentives or interest rates.
Interestingly location isn’t explicitly cited or mentioned in the ad copy. The primary uses of location are to determine which interest rate to serve and for geofencing. Below are actual examples of the ad creative for the campaign, which runs through Labor Day.
Opera enabled the dynamic creative by tapping into a Toyota API and data that identified “the most recent annual percentage rate (APR) for each dealership, by region.” Dynamic ad creative like this in mobile ads will become increasingly common and sophisticated.
Geographically relevant offers are served only to “auto-intenders” within the defined geofence. Those audiences are identified using “a blend of anonymous data from Opera’s proprietary Audience Management Platform.”
Early mobile ad uses of location were crude and often inaccurate. Over the course of the past year or two ad networks and platforms have become much more sophisticated about location — even though marketers have been slow to catch on. But they finally are.
Location can be used not only to identify nearby audiences — e.g., everyone within a mile of a McDonalds — but as a kind of mobile cookie substitute that can help marketers find the right audiences (e.g., QSR regulars, people who’ve been to car lots several times in the past month, etc.).
Sometimes location is made explicit in ad copy, which audiences have been shown to respond to. But, increasingly, it operates in the background as in this Toyota campaign. The two are not mutually exclusive, however.
There are no public data yet on the performance of the above ads, given that the campaign is still live. However the concepts and tactics illustrated here represent the future of location in mobile advertising.
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