Last week, at an invitation-only breakfast at Frameless, London’s largest permanent immersive art experience, we launched ANPR Audiences, which we believe is the most precise audience targeting capability in out-of-home.
The idea is simple. Instead of buying a site and hoping the right people walk past, advertisers can now buy the audience itself. Across 1,000+ full-motion screens at 134 motorway service areas, our intelligent platform gives a live view of who is at each location: where they live, their demographic profile, their spending habits and how they travel. It does this without collecting or processing any personal data. When a target audience over-indexes at a site, the right creative is triggered automatically, in the moment.
The detail behind that is considerable. Over 200 million data points a week feed the platform, and the launch includes 50+ pre-built audience segments, with the option to build bespoke audiences from more than 3,000 behaviours and demographics. Brands can also run conquesting campaigns against verified customers of competitor brands, rather than modelled proxies.
For CEO Jonathan Lewis, this is what the industry has been missing. “I’ve never met a client who wanted to buy an advertising site,” he said. “What they actually want is the audience it delivers. That’s exactly what ANPR Audiences lets us sell for the first time: not a modelled estimate, but a real audience, identified and reached in real time, at scale.” It is the argument he has made for some time: for OOH to compete in a digital-first world, it has to sell audiences, not panels.
The proof is already live. Lloyds Bank is the first brand to activate ANPR Audiences, running its My Car campaign with colour-matched creative triggered in real time as qualifying vehicles arrived at motorway service areas.
The product got a strong reception in the room. Jacob Jankel, i-media’s CTO, explained where it came from. “We became fluent in the language of vehicles, which was incredibly useful for our automotive clients. The challenge was that it was slightly limited beyond that. So the question became: how could we move from understanding the vehicle to understanding the wider audience our sites were reaching?”
The answer was a layered product: the vehicle, the location and the person. Partial postcode data and Starcount’s audience profiles, drawn from aggregated open banking and mobile location data, are matched with ANPR to build a clear picture of the audience at each site. “We are transforming millions of vehicle movements into privacy-conscious, actionable audience signals,” he said.
Rowena Humby, Co-founder & CEO of Starcount, spoke to what that combination makes possible. “ANPR Audiences is bringing some of the best of digital. The ability to use the ANPR data to understand who the audience was that was exposed, and then using the behavioural data to understand who they are and what they care about, what they’re passionate about, why they buy. Where we’re bringing in the banking data is a step further. It’s bringing the power of commerce and retail media to out-of-home.”
Data pioneer Clive Humby, co-founder of Dunnhumby and the architect of Tesco Clubcard, delivered the morning’s keynote, drawing a direct line between what loyalty data did for retail in the 1990s and what ANPR Audiences could do for OOH now. “Advertisers have learned what it means to buy an audience defined by real behaviour,” he said. “And they are not going back.”
The morning closed with a panel that brought the client perspective to the room. Emily Samal, Consumer Marketing Manager at Lloyds, spoke from a comms planning standpoint on why ANPR Audiences stood out, not just against other OOH options, but against digital alternatives. Lavern Mason, Senior Marketing Manager at Lloyds, spoke to the transport dimension: the search for genuine moments of connection with audiences, and what ANPR Audiences made possible for a brand whose ambition extends across the full car ownership journey. Shanil Chande, Chief Programmatic Officer at Talon, also shared his perspective on what ANPR Audiences opens up from a planning and effectiveness standpoint.
Read the full article by Ida Axling on Campaign Media
