When you think about how to reach an audience, you will likely come across these two truisms:
Content is king.
Context is king.
So, which one is it when constructing an ad campaign? The simple answer is that both are critically important to successful marketing programs—which must deliver a compelling message to a receptive audience. It comes down to delivering the right marketing message, to the right audience, in the right place.
In the world of mobile advertising, location is not only a critical dimension to consider but offers a great way to segment and target your message. Location-based advertising has been around for several years but it has been largely driven by the simple proximity concept. That is, ads are delivered to mobile users when they are near particular places. But predefined geographic areas—also called geofences—offer additional ways for marketing managers to think about physical spaces and to segment audiences in ways that align to social behaviors.
Consider the following scenario:
Several retail stores in the Oak Street shopping district in Chicago want to broadcast ads to would-be shoppers. One way to define the coverage area is to simply set a radius parameter of let’s say one-quarter mile. But in a defined downtown shopping district like Oak Street, a quarter mile will include areas outside the shopping zone and exclude areas in it. Essentially, a radius-based area (i.e. circle) is not the right shape to represent the area where people are actively shopping.
What if instead of each retail outlet defining their own ad target area, they could simply use a system where thousands of shopping areas had been predefined, with names, locations and perimeters? That is what we have done at Maponics. Our Shopping Boundaries dataset includes the geographic boundaries of more than 3,000 shopping malls, districts, centers and outlets across 100 metro areas in the United States. And through various partners, including Location Labs, these geofences can be leveraged in ad networks to focus marketing efforts on the geographic areas that best correspond to the target audience.
This image shows the Oak Street shopping district in Chicago. The red outline is the Maponics geofence compared to the radius-based targeting scheme represented by the shaded circles around selected retail stores.
In addition to shopping areas, we’ve defined more than 1,000 college campus geofences and more than 125,000 neighborhoods in North America. Imagine being able to target messages to mobile users based on whether they are on-campus/off-campus or based on what neighborhood they are in.
Read more about Maponics geofences here.
