Puma puts geotargeted ads on taxis for situationally aware OOH push

Dive Brief:

Footwear brand Puma launched a geotargeted out-of-home (OOH) campaign on Aug. 5, with ads delivered programmatically to screens atop taxis and ride-share vehicles, according to information provided to Marketing Dive. The campaign centers around the grand opening of the brand's flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Managed by Havas Media Group with the Whisk Agency and running through Sept. 5, the campaign utilizes the vehicle-based screens of Firefly's network.
The motion graphics ads are shown primarily when the vehicles drive around major airports, tourist attractions and other select ZIP codes, with campaign direction and ad frequency based on driver routes, area demographics and traffic patterns.

Dive Insight:

Firefly's network offers marketers increased targeting flexibility, making it something of a cross between online digital and OOH advertising. Because standard digital OOH ads have a fixed location, targeting and tracking capabilities are limited. With Firefly, marketers can display a particular ad based on micro-geographical targeting and variables like driver routes, surrounding traffic and area demographics. While this doesn't provide the kind of individual targeting available in some online contexts, it offers more flexibility than simply showing one ad to everyone who drives along a highway or travels through a crowded subway stop, and the resulting data better enables marketers to optimize their efforts.

"Amidst an ever-moving push toward digital, our clients are looking for meaningful media opportunities to more accurately measure the impact of out-of-home," Greg James, Havas Media Group's global chief strategy officer, said in a statement. "Firefly offered us that ability by giving us an impressions-based metric to track, wrapped up in a super creative execution."

The OOH campaign is one of the new directions Havas is bringing to Puma, which last fall moved its $120 million media business from Publicis Media's Blue 449. The move was propelled in part, Puma said at the time, by a desire to shift focus from the amount of media purchased to more quality relationships with media owners.

The campaign, focused on promoting Puma's new flagship store on Fifth Avenue, is the latest by a major brand to attempt a finer-tuning of OOH advertising for specific goals. Last fall, Pepsi ran an OOH campaign in the Netherlands where people who were logged into participating apps triggered ads on digital displays in shopping malls to encourage a blind taste-test between Coke and Pepsi, not far from a supermarket carrying Pepsi.

Last July, Delta Air Lines and Equinox Fitness ran an OOH campaign that employed real-time flight data to encourage arriving international travelers to "sweat away" their jet lag, using a one-day gym voucher.

The ability to offer ad targeting approaches out in the real world — combining data targeting with real-world behaviors and retailer proximity — is one of the reasons OOH ads grew 4.4% in 2018 over the previous year, according to a March report from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. This capped 35 straight quarters of growth, with digital OOH representing 29% of total 2018 OOH revenue.