• by Peter Bowen , September 1, 2009

Baseball season is in full swing, and advertisers should be swinging for the fences, too, but faced with economic uncertainty, some advertisers are sitting on the bench or deciding to get out of the game entirely. Bad move, of course.

Sports fans are incredibly loyal to their favorite teams and the brands that sponsor them. Research shows that advertisers that pull their advertising from a sports venue or stop supporting a team can take a huge hit in brand loyalty. So how can you stay in the game despite the current budgetary pressures? The answer is place-based digital advertising, which allows advertisers to cost effectively build brand awareness with the sports fans they most want to reach.

With place-based digital advertising, advertisers can leverage video screens popping up all over the country to reach fans at sports bars and stadiums, exercise devotees at health clubs, runners at stores selling athletic gear, and more-everywhere sports enthusiasts like to go. Given that digital video can be easily adapted for a variety of uses and used in a variety of locations, place-based digital advertising has emerged as an extremely effective branding medium.

According to research by OTX, 63% of adults reported that place-based digital advertising "catches their attention" -- more than any other media. And 44% of adults said they paid some or a lot of attention to place-based digital video advertising, placing it ahead of billboards, the Internet and mobile phones, and on par with magazines, radio and newspapers.

So what's capturing people's attention? The sheer number of place-based digital video screens has grown exponentially and now provides advertisers with the kind of national scale they need to effectively reach their audience. By aggregating this media across multiple networks, a national campaign relying only on digital video screens in places people go everyday can easily deliver more than 55 million weekly gross impressions at nearly 30,000 locations across the country.

Even more important, people pay attention when the message is relevant to them. For instance, sports marketers can customize this vast network to reach sports fans while they are doing all the things they love to do-and where they are the most receptive to the advertiser's message, including on Jumbotrons and other screens at sports stadiums, sports bars, health clubs, sporting goods stores and even on giant digital video screens on blimps at sporting events. And they can reinforce those messages at places that sports fans go as part of their regular routines, such as grocery stores, convenience stores, taxis, gas stations and doctors' offices.

Online media planning tools now make it easy for advertisers to run locally targeted placed-based digital advertising campaigns in places where people go everyday. The campaigns can be run nationally but be geo-focused in the markets or zip codes that matter to the advertiser. A key advantage of this technology is it offers advertisers the ability to reach a more precisely defined audience and spend less money.

The process of identifying the behaviors of an audience and connecting the places they go to with the digital advertising that will intercept them is called Life Pattern Marketing. Life Pattern Marketing is the most effective way for advertisers to find the optimal places to build brand ubiquity or increase the likelihood of reaching consumers in a particular market.

Think of it. For far less than the cost of broadcasting a traditional ad, place-based digital video advertising and Life Pattern Marketing let brands repeatedly reach the highly coveted consumers who head to the ballpark after work, get together for beers after the game, and then burn it all off the next morning at the club. More relevant exposure at less cost.

Today it's not enough merely to define the demographic characteristics of sports enthusiasts. It's more important to understand what they do and where they go, and then deliver relevant messages to them in multiple locations. Place-based digital video advertising is the proven way to accomplish this, and with today's newest tools for planning, optimizing, buying, and managing campaigns, sports marketers have an opportunity to hit a home run with every campaign.