HOLLA 3: The More Micro The Merrier

How can we make real use of hyperlocal advertising? In our series of HOLLA events, we x-ray today’s hottest communication phenomenons and trends. In our latest edition we decided to zoom in on location-based communication. From region to city, to street, to house or office, all the way to what’s 24/7 under your thumb: thy holy smartphone.

In our mission to save to world from boring advertising, we wanted to find out: How can we serve better and more relevant experiences based on location data?

We kicked off with a talk of our own digital strategist Yulia Yushchik. She showed us how the lines between the off- and online world has never been as thin as they are now. Digitally focused companies like Whole Foods, Uber and Starbucks profit from the fact that they can use people’s locations to serve more relevant ads.

I like it. What do you mean?

Location Based communication comes in many forms and shapes. Here’s some lingo that will make you look bright at the water cooler:

1> Geo – messages:

When you use your hometown in your settings of your social media accounts, advertisers can target you on your location.

2> Push messages / Beacons

Using NFC on Android phones and Bluetooth on iPhone a beacon can send push messages to the people who are around that beacon. A beacon can also collect data of mobile devices in the near distance, already oftenly used in public spaces for crowd control.

3> Mobile Web messages

When using the browser on your smartphone, the browser knows where you are at that moment in time due to your IP-address and can serve targeted ads.

4> In-app advertising

When using free apps like Weather.com, Tripadvisor and so on, you give permission to the app to collect your data. This is also called: Device ID Capture. So, Mobile DSP’s capture all these ID’s on all these free apps around the world and the more and more they know where people are. Then the Mobile DSP serves an ad which is very relevant to that smartphone-owner.

Our Holla guests

The next speaker was Viktor Wubbe from Targetoo & MobileFirst_. He showed us how to reach the ever ‘on-the-go’ crowd. He shared how he got high school kids to not use their phones while cycling. The campaign targeted school areas (by geofencing the exact school-locations) so that the pupils who were around the school after class hours, would come across their message, all the way through their popular routes back home.

(geofencing the neighbourhood of SuperHeroes Amsterdam)

Beacons
Katalin Gallyas shared her view on how beacons work in public spaces and how organisations could benefit from this technology to reach their audiences around a beacon at a certain moment. It was interesting to see that beacons are playing a more and more important role in public spaces. For example, to provide people with information about a hotspot in town.

Jonathan Duque from Estimote joined us virtually from Krakow to explain us how beacon technology works and how advertisers can use them clever for their target audiences.

Holla3 ended with Belgian media artist Dries Depoorter. He shared with us his fun and clever projects, many of which based on location data. It included his art installation “Jaywalking”. This work follows people via cameras at traffic lights and you could report people when they would jaywalk. The screengrab of the jaywalker is then automatically sent to the nearest police station.

Next to some fresh insights nobody had to leave our hideout empty-handed. Dries gave everyone a chance of winning 25.000 followers on Instagram with his very own scratch tickets. So if you see an enormous increase of followers amongst one of your peers… think twice.

Keep following our social media for our next Holla event.