Dive Brief:

• Out-of-home advertising, such as billboards, and digital marketing are forming an interesting and maybe unexpected partnership via mobile technology.
• One example is location analytics company Placed, which is working with partners such as out-of-home inventory suppliers like Clear Channel Media to offer its user attribution between billboards and in-store traffic.
• This ability is based on opted-in mobile phone users who allow location tracking that can indicate exposure to out-of-home ads and subsequent visits to brick-and-mortar locations of the advertisers.

Dive Insight:

Placed Founder and CEO David Shim explained in a statement that in the past year, the company has had advertisers increasingly ask to be able to apply Placed Attribution to OOH.

"OOH advertisers and media companies continue to push for measurement beyond proximity, and Placed Attribution delivers against that demand by introducing a viewability metric combined with ROI metrics including store visits, purchases, and revenue," Shim said in the same statement.

Placed is also working with NCM, a cinema ad network, as another out-of-home ad partner. For billboards, Placed claims it goes beyond just proximity to determine if someone was actually exposed to the ad. The company unveiled plans to introduce a patent pending approach to viewability that will take angle, distance and direction into account. "The ability to not only measure proximity, but viewability, combined with the digital standard for ad to in-store, makes OOH on par with digital in terms of measurement and attribution," a statement reads.

For marketers, this is another example of the importance and value of being able to measure campaign impact across channels, especially as mobile devices are becoming a digital marketing asset that goes beyond a message delivery device. It is also important to note that users being tracked by Placed are opted-in, a tactic that marketers should engage in with any highly-personal tracking or marketing. Transparency is always a good policy, and further, any backlash against tactics that are highly-invasive from a privacy standpoint could lead to regulation and oversight.