Real-Time Advertising Landscape: Decoding it

With today’s cluttered advertising landscape, even with a plethora of media options, it’s an uphill task for brands to break through and connect with their desired audiences. Savvy consumers are now more aware and wary of advertising tactics, and have become desensitised to blatant advertising messages. In fact, consumers prefer not to be sold to, but want to be actively involved in the buying process.

The challenge marketers face today is how then can brands create relevant consumer engagements that not only enable their messages to resonate with the consumers of today, but also build a relationship that offers opportunities to influence, connect and be involved with their audiences. The solution – real-time advertising.

Real-time advertising is all about engaging audiences with relevant interactions, and connecting them to relevant products or services in that moment in time.

This is in stark contrast to disruptive advertising, which interrupts the consumer’s daily routine, and more often than not, leads to a bitter aftertaste. Real-time advertising requires a more intelligent and intimate approach in creating relevant and meaningful engagements between the brand and the consumer.

To generate relevant interactions, you will need to understand your target customers. Aside from understanding their demographics and psychographics, it’s equally important to understand that people react differently to similar advertising messages at different times of the day, being influenced by psychological, personal and social factors. Thus, it’s even more important to establish connections at the right time and place, with the right context.

Still, content is king when devising effective marketing strategies.

Remembering that consumers do not want to be sold to, while taking on a more participative role in the buying process, brands are now becoming content creators. We’ve seen many examples of how generating relevant, valuable content through co-creating experiences with potential consumer bases have helped brands forge stronger relationships with them. From what we’ve found, the CTR (click-through rate) of client banners in our editorial environment was 10 times better than run-of-the-mill site banners without the context of branded content.

Audiences enjoy reading editorial content rather than run-of-the-mill ads or branded content, with the average CTR of the editorial showcase banners promoting more stories from the series at a staggering 1%. In this mobile era, we’re either looking at our smartphones or looking at where we’re going. So naturally, digital and outdoor media are logical platforms to utilise when reaching out to audiences.

Especially in Singapore, where our government has put in place significant measures on public transportation options, bus shelters remain an important advertising medium to subliminally market to the masses, with 6.5 shelters per km2 in this highly urbanised and dense city state. Being along high-traffic areas, bus shelters also have high visibility among walking passers-by and private transport commuters due to their high viewing angle.

With the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s vision of having 75% of all peak-hour journeys undertaken on public transport, our daily commuting routes to work, school or play are important strategic factors in reaching out to audiences. These routes can bring about personalised advertisements that can interest audiences on their daily commute.

Making real-time advertising a reality

Only until recently, outdoor advertisements were mainly static posters on billboards and bus shelters. With the recent digitalisation of posters, bus shelter panels are going digital and brands are branching into mall-screen advertising. There are an increasing number of creative executions that are complemented with digital technologies to effectively engage audiences and create lasting experiences via social media.

For instance, with NFC-enabled screens, Mediacorp OOH Media’s Opti-Prime digital screens can become an information portal, an extended shopfront or a digital concierge, with the potential to tailor the interactive experience according to the audience’s preferences, and for them to take away the experience on their smartphones and continue their engagements together on their commute.

Outdoor advertising is proving to be a powerful advertising medium. Rapid advancements in outdoor technology, along with key consumer insights, especially travelling patterns, is leading the way in generating personal engagements for brands to consumers.

Most importantly, to create successful engagements which are meaningful, relevant and engaging, advertisers need to gather and understand the right insights about their consumers.

Mediacorp’s Customer 360 approach has helped brands to demystify consumer segments and bring valuable insights to advertisers by harnessing various demographics, interests and behavioural insights across our online and offline platforms. Advertisers can access more than 100 curated audience segments such as travel, food, health, sports, automotive and finance. These insights help advertisers strengthen their existing campaign plans, enabling brands to create personalised, meaningful engagements that will drive more positive interactions and encourage desired behaviours from audiences.

Combining that with the power of digital and outdoor media, we would be able to generate instant profiles of passers-by looking at the panels through facial recognition, serving up ads that are tailored accordingly to audiences. These profiles are derived from their digital/ media consumption to determine lifestyle patterns, and would bring up relevant ads to interest commuters.

The strategic locations of our advertising panels at bus shelters play an important role in the consumer’s path-to-purchase journey.

Most commuters generally have a decent 10-15 minutes of waiting time, and they are bound to spend some time looking at their surroundings and check for their bus arrival. This becomes an opportunity for brands to interact with potential consumers. Real-time last-minute offers from retailers nearby can be pushed accordingly to various commuters.

Based on our existing pool of consumer insights, the relevancy and appropriateness of these offers to commuters at that point in time presents them a compelling reason to head to these retailers or applications on their smartphone to seal the last-mile journey on the consumer’s path-to-purchase. That’s how real-time advertising can enhance and build lasting consumer relationships with your brand.

The writer is Henry Goh, head of Mediacorp OOH.