Programmatic trading has long been reserved for interactive channels such as display and online video. Its targetable nature has made it attractive to performance marketers, but largely irrelevant to upper-funnel brand marketers. Meanwhile, above the line channels such as TV and out-of-home have continued to be traded traditionally with planning and measurement relying on just panel data.
John Lewis Home Solutions provides a marketplace for customers to find qualified tradespeople for home improvements. In 2018 it needed to increase brand awareness whilst improving accountability of its spend. It asked Infectious Media to raise its profile through a transparent and effective real-time programmatic out-of-home (OOH) campaign. Bringing real-time to OOH would allow it to be more efficient at reaching the right people in large numbers.
Programmatic planning: Infectious Media found the locations in which people most often read about home improvement by using contextual web page data taken from the wider brand’s online display activity. These postcodes were cross-referenced with available OOH placements to inform targeting.
Bringing rigour to OOH measurement: Visitors to the brand’s website were split into test and
control groups based on proximity to the OOH placements, allowing actual uplift in traffic and sales caused by the advertising to be measured.
The result? The UK’s first real-time programmatic OOH campaign led to more effective targeting, financial and reporting transparency, and verifiable increased traffic (up to 29%) and sales (up to 8%).
