With the help of Location Intelligence, Moving Walls automates outdoor advertising planning, buying, and measurement
Moving Walls, a Singapore-based technology company, brings transparency and automation to out-of-home advertising. Its Moving Audiences is Asia’s first advertising technology stack built specifically to enable stakeholders in the out-of-home media market and to plan campaigns and transact on thousands of billboard assets across India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and the United States.
The company works with multiple stakeholders including media agencies, brands, and asset owners. It is also a Unilever Foundry Company and was named one of the top 50 tech companies in the world by TiE50 in Silicon Valley.
Moving walls recently acquired Quad42, an Indian digital signage management platform, with the firm belief that programmatic media and programmable screens in retail will come together in the future where advertisers will then be able to activate “all screens” to deliver personalized communication.
Moving Walls’ ambitious vision of this future is inspired by the Tom Cruise starrer science fiction movie Minority Report. The company believes that technologies shown in the movie are pertinent to how advertising would look like in a couple of decades.
“If you have watched the Minority Report, there are two things that stand out in the scene when the protagonist enters a GAP store. There is a programmatic advertisement that gets served to him, and after he walks into the store you have a programmable screen that welcomes him. We believe that these retail screens will become very important as part of the value chain.”, says Srikanth Ramachandran, Founder & CEO, Moving Walls, in an exclusive interview with Geospatial World
Location-based services are fundamental to targeted and customized advertisements. How do you deploy location?
Today we leave digital footprints everywhere we go. These footprints are left via mobile location signals when interacting with WiFi or IoT sensors, or even through social media and online maps.
This type of data provides insights around the profile of audiences passing by physical media assets – Where are they coming from? Where are they going? Where else do they go? How many times will they be exposed to the same message? all this information can be used to deliver the right messages on the right media assets at the right times.
Do you think seamless integration of location and 5G would lead to a new paradigm?
5G is going to be very interesting for because the bandwidth will essentially supercharge what can be done at these locations. When we look at programmatic in the digital world, the transactions and targeting are done in real-time. With 5G, this would be possible with large billboards. It would reduce the latency between knowing what’s happening at a location and responding with the right messages.
In the age of Industry 4.0 how do you foresee location-based advertisements?
The first wave of location-based advertising began with the assumption that messages have to be served to your mobile screen while the next wave would hinge on the ability to serve it to a larger screen.
Many studies around the world have shown that if you see something on a large screen then you are much more likely to engage with or search for that brand online. The very instinct of searching is triggered in physical spaces. This is the convergence that we see. Jokingly, we say that mobile is just another out-of-home screen.
When it comes to automating the entire processes of outdoor advertising, it is essential to check that at every level there is no margin of error. How does Moving Walls ensure it?
We follow a three-level auditing process. At the first level, it is called the proof of play so we have the ability to pick up data from the screens on what got played and at what time of the day. So you get to know if you had bought five thousand spots then did the five thousand spots deliver. This is at a very basic level.
But we go beyond that in proof of play. We have a simple app that we ship to the media owners to take a physical picture of that site and it obviously locks down the coordinates and provides visual proof of play.
The third thing that we do is to look at the audiences’ data around that billboard and reconcile this with when the advertisement ran so we are able to say how advertisers can improve their buying decisions based on some matrix of reach and frequency of the audiences.
