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Layers & Leverage: How a strategic approach to local advertising expands a national campaign’s ROI

In describing why national advertisers should layer a local approach on their national efforts to expand both reach and impact, Steve DeMain, executive vice president of sales at Locality, a provider of local advertising services, points out that “every market looks different.” For example, he says, even if an advertiser is already “running ads across all 210 DMAs and buying both streaming and broadcast, the ad has more potential to make a larger impact in each market if the advertiser layers in local nuances.”

Some markets, he notes, “are underserved from a streaming or a broadcast perspective—or even both.” Leveraging new technologies such as automatic content recognition [ACR] data to measure the penetration in a specific market and working with a specialty provider of local ad services “can help brands learn which streaming services are being consumed and understand the broadcast footprint of the local market. This allows advertisers to layer the buys together and extend reach. 

DeMain points to a recent national campaign where, by focusing on the brand messaging and tailoring that messaging to specific markets, the advertiser “layered the local ad buys together and saw incremental increases as high as 10-12% in reach.” Moreover, he says, “we know the efficacy of the local campaign resonated because the advertiser came back and renewed for a second campaign.”

Leveraging new ad creative, audience targeting, and measurement technologies and then layering local advertising on top of national ads to expand reach and impact is the strategy through which Locality guides its clients. Locality is taking the general push for “incremental reach across every campaign” to a level well beyond “table stakes,” says DeMain. As he explains, “there’s plenty of information and services available that allow advertisers to determine how to drive incremental reach.” But what’s critical, he says, “is to define success for the advertiser.” That means, he adds, considering both streaming and broadcast options, applying measurement recommendations, and “delivering efficacy, whether it’s through a brand study, conversion tracking, or a foot traffic study, depending on the particular advertisers’ KPIs.” The result: “It’s a one-two punch where value is delivered to both the agency and the advertiser.”

Focus on Strategy Before Tactics

Pursuing this approach, DeMain stresses, is best started strategically. “We apply the tactics once we understand the strategy,” he says. For instance, while a brand focused strictly on national advertising might say, “I’m buying the entire country, and that’s part of my strategy,” a local advertising strategy is going to vary market by market “because there are a variety of different market conditions that impact it.”

One example might be a retailer concerned about in-store foot traffic when facing inclement weather conditions in their markets across half the country. “That is going to affect how many people go into the store,” DeMain points out. “So if we start with an understanding of the advertiser’s broad strategy and goals, then narrow in on the best approach through which the advertiser can maximize reach in each market, we will determine the best strategy market-by-market. This allows us to take it a step further, by solving for the varying tactics in each market depending on the advertiser’s overall objective.”

A number of emerging data-driven technologies are fueling advertisers’ ability to effectively extend their campaigns locally, and these, DeMain notes, allow advertisers to “really measure reach and frequency on a local level, across both streaming and broadcast, that they couldn’t do even a year ago.” He points to ACR technology, which “lives inside smart TVs and provides measurement of every creative and piece of content that is delivered through the glass more effectively.” With advancements in artificial intelligence, digital creative, and “dynamic creative, much of what you see in display ads and social ads you can now apply to video for a holistic local approach.”

Data-driven enhancements on local campaign measurement have been particularly important. As DeMain puts it, “With these advancements, advertisers can measure reach and frequency on a local level,” which provide a more accurate assessment “across streaming and broadcast, allowing us to guide advertisers and agencies on the optimal mix of these video channels, by market.” With these insights, he adds, “advertisers can understand the type of messaging or the scale of an audience on streaming or broadcast in a specific market. Layering in the localized creative messaging and audience targeting capabilities on top of that, advertisers can determine how to optimize local campaigns from a performance perspective in real time.”

Not One-Size-Fits-All

How that campaign is optimized and how tactics are developed to advance the overall strategy is dependent on a range of factors. “Local is a different approach to meet each consumer where they are, which is different than a one-size-fits-all national campaign,” DeMain says.

For example, a larger agency, with more resources at its fingertips, may have a strategy in place with a “toolbox of tactics” at its disposal. Given that, DeMain notes, “we have a lot of local ad supply that larger agencies can have access to, whether it’s streaming or broadcast, and we can help guide them by localizing a national campaign, determining which markets are underserved, and layering on local strategy and tactics to reinforce the campaign.”

Independent agencies, on the other hand, DeMain says, not only already tend to work with more regionalized advertisers but generally “have more insight around their markets because they’re in the market already.”

In either case, leveraging local measurements that are available is key. “If an advertiser is focused on the creative that it’s produced,” DeMain explains, “the advertiser shouldn’t necessarily change that overall strategy because there tends to be a lot of development or insights that have gone into the creative itself.” If the goal is to drive up the efficacy of a specific creative within a specific campaign, he says, “we tend to look at the measurement—for example, a brand lift study or website visits—and whether they’re trying to drive audiences to a website or foot traffic to a specific location, then determine what data tells us in terms of the performance and apply that to a recommendation.”

Informing that recommendation is the question of how an advertiser is approaching targeting. “How broad of an audience is the advertiser trying to reach?” DeMain asks. While local targeting would focus in on “a ZIP code or a DMA or a state or regional level,” an audience-targeting approach might zero in on a specific type of audience in a geographic area. “It might be,” he explains, “that a regional QSR is targeting people who are interested in unique culinary experiences. Since that audience’s interests are more important than their geographic proximity to a physical store location, the QSR wants everyone in this region to understand that its business caters to the more culinary-focused adventure eater.”

Don’t Over-Engineer

Inherent in building strategies for these campaigns is playing to the relative strengths of streaming and broadcast—and combining them in service to the advertiser. DeMain cites the example of an advertiser who is considering retargeting an ad for CTV. “The advertiser could start by running a campaign on CTV with a broader message,” he says, “and then retarget those users on other devices with a more specific, personalized message.”

Despite all the options now available for more precise targeting—from measurement tools and AI to digital creative technologies—DeMain cautions against the tendency for advertisers to “over-engineer” their campaigns. “When an advertiser says, ‘I want to find a very specific audience in a very specific market in a very specific window,’ we often see those campaigns start to unravel,” he says. “Don’t set yourself up for failure by being too specific.” Instead, “layer on tactics and use the power of streaming and broadcast together to reach a broader audience with your broadcast strategy and then refine it with the tactics of streaming.”

In the next installment of this series, we’ll dig deeper into how local convergent video combines the precision of streaming with the broad reach of broadcast TV, covering the MediaPost webinar that Locality is sponsoring on October 29. For information on that webinar, click here.

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