• by Philip Rosenstein , July 6, 2017

Geospatial technology firm Vistar Media on Thursday launched a solution to help automotive marketers more accurately measure attribution from out-of-home (OOH) advertising.

Vistar’s solution leverages data from IHS Markit and web-intent information from thousands of other third-party websites relating to the automotive industry. IHS Markit aggregates data from 130 million households to inform a predictor database focused on developing insights on the automotive industry.

“Now, through our partnership with IHS, we are combining audience segments with our data on movement patterns in the physical world, which allows our geospatial technology to target campaigns in out-of-home and measure real-world attribution,” Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media told Digital News Daily via email. “By using Vistar's technology to connect offline transactional data, online behavioral data, and physical world movement data, marketers can not only understand who is in-market but also understand where to best reach and engage with them.”

Early beta clients in 2016 included Toyota, which partnered with Vistar to to run a national promotional campaign for its August Sales Event to market the RAV4, Corolla, Tundra, Camry, Prius, Avalon and Sienna. Companies like Toyota combine Vistar data with their own purchase information to develop a deeper understanding of ROI on OOH spending.

Toyota also used Vistar’s expertise to help craft specific messaging targeted to particular demographics. According to Vistar, lift in the “in-market + demographic” audience was higher than that of the overall campaign.

Vistar has existing data partnerships with SAP, Acxiom, IBM and others.

Effectively measuring the success of OOH advertising has always been out of reach for marketers, connecting purchases to where consumers have been during the day proving extremely difficult.

Now with strong geo-location technology and digital attribution abilities, marketers are finding new ways of connecting on- and off-line data, helping marketers take further control of their spend by better understanding their ROI.