• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, September 4, 2014

If you happened to be near a Toyota dealership this Labor Day weekend and had shown some inclination toward car shopping in the past, then your mobile phone may have gotten a Toyota ad with localized load offers. All during August, culminating this past weekend, Toyota and its AOR Saatchi & Saatchi combined location, brand data and dynamic ad creative for a highly targeted summer sales push.

Using the Opera Mediaworks serving platform, the campaign used location data to dynamically serve nearby APR loan rates to auto intenders. The trick was tying the campaign in with Toyota’s own database of dealerships and the latest information on loan rates in the relevant areas.

In early results, Opera claimed the combination of targeting, prospect filtering and dynamic creative resulted in a 101% lift in response from auto intenders, compared to mobile ads without localized creative.

Interestingly, the campaign uses location-specific data in background. The ad units themselves let you search for a localized deals and offer up an APR, but they aren’t calling out your city or local dealership in the initial ad copy. This is a more passive approach to location than we typically see.  It has become something of a convention of local digital advertising to acknowledge it knows the consumer's location. This little shard of personalization  is presumed to have an impact on people’s willingness to both see and engage with the ad. 

Opera Mediaworks says that ultimately this kind of data combo delivers a level of unprecedented relevance that is implicit and clear to the consumer. In a statement, company President, Global Ad Sales Scott Swanson speculated, “Stretch your imagination. What if the dealer could take a picture of a car sitting right there on the lot, populate the ad unit with it, and serve it to a customer that was shopping for that exact model – and happens to be across the street? That is where advertisers can and should go with this technology.”

Well, we are still a long way off from the creative, dynamic or static, catching up with the targeting capabilities. But the concept of endowing mobile digital channels with such precise location and user awareness is akin to extending the car salesman’s reach across streets and around corners. Suddenly the cringe-inducing helicopter salesman and his “What do I have to do to get you into a car today” pitch has legs, literally. The prospect is both intriguing and chilling.