IAB Canada hosted our 5th Annual Location Based Advertising event yesterday on April 27, 2022. The agenda was packed with top industry leaders and the community was filled with optimism, and borderline giddiness, about some of the innovation taking place in the space. Best of all, we heard amazing reports of cross-collaboration across the industry. It was truly a fun afternoon of content.
Kicking off the day, we shared our findings from the latest IAB Canada Barometer Report. Surveying our members (over half from the buy side) on the state of LBA, one thing is abundantly clear, with the recovery from the global pandemic underway, there is a resurgence in focus on what this space can do for marketers, and this is evidenced in the rising budgets being seen across the space.
With doors opening and foot traffic back on the rise, the location of signage remains a top priority. When asking our members what’s next, we got a resounding nod towards foot traffic attribution and data. There to unpack the issue, was topic sponsor, Pelmorex who conveyed the importance of leveraging foot traffic reporting to accurately connect advertising exposure to in-store visits. Being able to tie together time and location of a message to an actual store visit offers an insightful and data driven means of measuring effectiveness of your advertising campaign at your fingertips.
Location data is solidly set as a viable currency for reaching addressable audiences (with a noted little concern for the impact of the loss of cookies) and this was echoed throughout the day. With privacy first solutions sitting at the forefront of the emerging tech stack, we also anticipate the way we plan digital as a whole moving closer to how things having always been done in OOH – by leveraging context and probabilistic data sets. This form of addressability will become the norm and according to our panel on Measurement and Innovation, agencies will be forced to eventually adopt more synergistic approaches to buying media. Using data inputs not reliant on device ids such as cohort info, postal codes, traffic, and weather data they will find new, and equally satisfying means, to reach marketer KPIs.
An area of untapped opportunity was identified on the creative side. Leveraging dynamic ad insertion to inform creative messaging and foot traffic and audience mapping while on the rise, remains a major opportunity for growth. As we see more convergence with other forms of media like sound, we expect to see a ton of creative ad insertion in the space and an elevated level of sophistication in planning and delivery across the board.
IAB Canada would like to thank all the participants who provided tremendous thought leadership through their presentations and discussions. A special thanks to our topic sponsors, Pelmorex Corp and Stingray.
We’ll see you at the State of the Nation event on June 1, 2022 from 1:00pm to 3:30 pm EDT.