Partner Content from Lime Media
What has four wheels and a tech stack so savvy it can geo-target customers, prove performance in real time and deliver a 45 percent boost in retail foot traffic? We’re talking LED billboard trucks, those small but mighty screens on wheels you couldn’t miss if you tried — and that’s exactly the idea.
Thanks to a powerful suite of onboard high-tech targeting and tracking capabilities, today’s LED billboard trucks are capable of precise routing, real-time geo-targeting and performance tracking that, altogether, help get the right message to the right consumer at the right time. It’s an entirely new use of the mobile marketing medium that combines the latest technologies with the reach of OOH and the attention-getting power of live engagement marketing to form a new marketing tool that’s as smart as it is effective.
Lime Media, a 20-year veteran in the experiential marketing industry with deep roots in mobile truck strategy and fabrication, is leading the way with a fleet of 80 (and growing) “smart” trucks located in each of the country’s top 50 DMAs. Unlike their counterparts in digital OOH, LED billboard trucks are always on the move and therefore better able to penetrate high index target markets and ultimately increase visibility and engagement. It’s this flexibility paired with an expansive data set being collected as the trucks progress through their target markets that helps Lime Media deliver real, measurable ROI for a wide array of brands.
“We can deploy in one place for a couple of weeks and collect a lot of data, and then we can come back to the client and say, ‘Here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working. Here are the people that we’re actually encountering. Here’s the foot traffic that we’re seeing. Here’s the traffic we’re seeing on your website coming from this particular region. Let’s adjust our routing schedule,” says Bart McCollum, President, Lime Media. “Then we can correlate that back and say, ‘For your other nine markets, here’s how we would invest more and get you more results.’ No other LED truck company can do that or is even thinking like that.”
An Upgrade to the DOOH Model
LED billboard trucks offer a qualitative upgrade to the digital OOH model. They are attention grabbing by design. They generate high recall rates. They act as engines for viral content. And they create opportunities for brands to pinpoint very small target audiences and make meaningful contact. So much so that the trucks have been able to generate foot traffic increases of 30-45 percent and sales lifts of more than 10 percent.
It’s the kind of performance data marketers are looking for now more than ever as the pressure to substantiate advertising and OOH costs against a return on investment grows ever higher. Indeed, traditional OOH buys don’t come with the same accountability or transparency. “Runtime” is not a KPI.
“With traditional OOH, there’s Geopath [the industry standard for OOH measurement], and they provide a lot of the credibility of measurement. They quantify what types of impressions you’re going to get, what types of demographics will likely see it, and, in a lot of cases that’s turned into a CPM, and people understand ‘This is how I’m buying media,’” says Andrew Moehlman, Head of Process & Technology, Lime Media. “But when you put your inventory on wheels and it can go wherever you want? That breaks the mold.”
LED billboard trucks are often able to over index on the target audiences a brand is after, with as much as three or four times the number of people reached, according to Todd Herndon, Chief Revenue Officer, Lime Media. This is due to sophisticated routing that takes in-depth demographic data into account instead of relying on basic zip codes. “Our customers and clients are getting what they actually pay for,” says Herndon. “They are getting real ROI.”
Central to that ROI is the cutting-edge tech stack running Lime Media’s LED billboard trucks, which include demographic-based market and route planning, a Proof of Performance Data app displaying impression capture, SMART Directional Programming, multi-lingual messaging and custom routing capabilities. Altogether, these tools merge into a CRM that delivers clients impression data, route maps, and creative logs, so that they can be assured that they earned certain types of views from the right types of personas. Lime Media then coalesces all of this real-time performance data with historical data to create a fuller picture of who lives, plays and works where — and how to reach them.
“We’re pairing the experiential flexibility and custom routings of moving trucks with digital precision and impression beacons and real data, and that’s new in the out of home world,” says Madison Hill, Business Development, LED, Lime Media.
Measured Impact Across Industries
LED billboard trucks can be used for a wide array of brands and industries ranging from telecom and retail to healthcare and CPG and beyond. Lime Media has helped clients expand their footprints and overall impact at music festivals with multi-day pre-festival and during-festival mobile tours.
A recent recruitment campaign for airline pilots and flight attendants leveraged the LED billboard trucks’ ability to find and engage with a very small population and then, once one goal was met, pivot the message until the second group met the brand’s recruitment goals. Another brand used the trucks to engage doctors and nurses coming and going to work by overlaying dozens of data points that revealed a very specific truck route in Northwest Fort Worth would find just the right audience (hint: it did.) And yet another brand, a telecom company, regularly uses the trucks to promote retail sales and product launches because of the hefty sales lifts and foot traffic they generate.
Indeed, static OOH just can’t micro-target the same way an LED truck can. And it can’t change its video content dynamically in the same way either. Lime Media’s trucks can change the LED screen content on the fly so breakfast crowds are getting one offer in the morning and another in the afternoon. Dynamic text driven by smart directional technology enables the truck to ping the nearest location to drive consumers to the closest store. This enables marketers to attribute the ad time back to just those stores and deliver their c-suites in-depth analysis on foot traffic and store lift at a granular level. Say it with us now — that’s just more for the money.
“So instead of saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to drive around for eight hours in Boston,’ we can say here, specifically, is where your customers are spending their time,” says Moehlman. “So, let’s design an intelligent plan of how we go spend your ad dollars, dwelling with the billboard, if you will, in the right spots.”
From a logistics perspective, Lime Media has all but eliminated the pain point experienced by brands who want to run a mobile campaign but find out that they have to manage 10 truck brokers in 10 markets — or more. Lime Media’s team provides a single point of contact for its full fleet, which is on track to reach 200 trucks by the end of the year.
“We have live GPS tracking so you can log in and see, my truck is right here,” says Herndon. “I can track it on the map. I can see the route and where it’s going. I’m getting photos every day that are showing where it’s at. And I have a direct, accountable person that I can call at any time who’s going to answer the phone and make sure that my program is going well.”
It’s this real-world connection that sets Lime Media’s “smart” LED billboard trucks apart for consumers. And they might just be the antidote to a consumer market growing more and more skeptical of what they see online and more and more motivated by what they experience in the real world.
“Users online crave something they can tell physically happened and was real,” says Moehlman. “So when you have the opportunity to be out there in the physical world and actually capture somebody’s attention or create an experience with them, the impact is significantly greater.”
For more information, head to lime-media.com. Featured image photo credit: ODN x Lime Media.
