Consumers today have options. Increasingly, they have the ability to shop for the best deal they can get from energy, television, phone and Internet service providers. Most of these providers recognize that an empowered consumer means they have to dramatically increase their marketing in order to break through the online clutter and stay competitive.
The U.S. telecommunications and energy industries spent over $5.5 billion last year on digital advertising. They recognize that consumers are doing more of their research and completing more of their purchases online. According to a recently released study from Millward Brown Daily, time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. So, as households drop landlines and cable, the key to converting customers is to reach them through this online medium.
In the past, targeting audiences online has mostly been done through cookies. Selecting generic cookie segments of inferred audience intent was used without question, because frankly it was the only option. Service providers especially, however, are beginning to recognize the shortcomings of this technology – it doesn’t fit the ‘mobile-first generation,’ and can’t address the one-to-one targeting fallacy.
Semcasting Smart Zones™ solves the cookie’s issues in online advertising.
Smart Zones uses big data and a patented methodology to link our extensive offline database to the online Internet delivery points of consumers and businesses across the U.S. and Canada. We match customers to their location and to the devices they prefer, enabling nearly 100 percent reach across any Internet-enabled medium. We do this without tracking or compromising an individual’s privacy.
A home-energy provider in Chicago was interested in targeting older suburban neighborhoods where the useful lives of furnaces and air conditioning units were approaching obsolescence. They needed complete coverage of neighborhoods of single-family homes that were between 15 and 20 years old, and with home values above $400,000.
The ideal audience included families with children that had a length of residence between 5 and 10 years, were energy conscious, and had discretionary income that was at least 110 percent of the local average.
Using publicly available data, homeowners with the appropriate demographic history were identified and scored in an offline list. Smart Zones then converted this offline list of the top 25,000 qualified households into Smart Zones, matching 100 percent of that list. Each zone was then matched to the preferred device and contextual media category of prospects, and over a period of 30 days over 90% of the target audience was reached through online and mobile advertising on multiple RTB exchanges.