Ad Format Archives

Introducing Dynamic Creative

Optimizing Store Visits with Audience-First Creative

In today’s marketing landscape, personalized messaging reigns supreme. By embracing the nuances of local audiences, advertisers can finely calibrate their campaigns to reach specific consumers, ensuring that messages resonate on a personal level. With dynamic ad creatives that adapt on the fly, you’re always in sync with the consumer. This precision doesn’t just boost engagement; it cultivates trust, driving visits to physical store locations and boosting Return on Ad Spend for marketers.

At Locala, we’re on a mission to simplify multi-location advertising. We are an omnichannel advertising platform that leverages consumer insights and machine learning AI to help marketers efficiently plan, buy, and measure multi-location campaigns on a global scale. To further this mission, we recently unveiled our latest innovative ad format, the Dynamic Creative. It enables advertisers to dynamically adapt their creative based on hyperlocal audiences and their proximity to a brand’s store location.

Adopting Dynamic Creative with Locala

Every consumer and store location is unique, so why treat them all the same? In the ever-evolving advertising landscape, it’s clear that a one-size-fits-all approach no longer suffices for advertisers seeking tangible business results. At Locala, we leverage affinity, mobility, and purchase data to identify a brand’s loyal customers and valuable prospects, all at the store level. Once identified, we can dynamically serve creatives that adapt the images, messaging, and nearest store location based on the audience, ensuring resonance with the consumer we are targeting.

The Power of Hyperlocal

Adapting creative to hyperlocal audiences offers numerous benefits for advertisers. Firstly, it empowers businesses to scale their multi-location advertising campaigns more effectively by tailoring messaging to each specific audience and geographic area. This customization ensures that content is not only relevant to the local audience but also conveys messages more likely to resonate with individuals in those areas.

Secondly, using messaging that resonates with the local audience increases user engagement, drives more foot traffic to physical stores, and ultimately results in a higher conversion rate. By recognizing the unique characteristics and preferences of hyperlocal audiences, businesses can create more impactful and successful advertising campaigns.

Creating Unique Experiences with Locala

At Locala, we specialize in crafting unique and impactful experiences for our clients’ marketing campaigns. Our skilled design team collaborates closely with clients to develop customized solutions aligned with their specific goals and objectives. Whether it’s for mobile, DOOH, Desktop, or CTV, we are committed to delivering high-quality and creative designs that drive results.

To learn more about the convenience and accessibility of the Dynamic Creative format, contact us today!

Introducing the Store Navigator

Locala is excited to announce the release of our latest innovative ad format, the Store Navigator! Using Locala’s proprietary location-based technology, the Store Navigator provides users with a brand’s nearest store locations, including information on distance, directions, and travel time depending on the chosen travel mode (walking, driving, public transportation, and more).The result : the Store Navigator enables advertisers to increase foot traffic by seamlessly driving consumers to their nearest store locations.

How it Works

With the Store Navigator format, users are presented with an ad that includes a call to action, encouraging them to shop in-store. When clicked on, users are directed to a map displaying the brand’s store locations, listed from nearest to farthest based on the user’s position. After selecting a store location, users can choose their preferred travel mode and assess the distance and estimated time to reach the store. From there, they receive directions on the optimal route to their destination.

The Benefits

Brands can leverage the Store Navigator to increase foot traffic and sales at their brick-and-mortar locations through an engaging and user-friendly advertising experience. Users, on the other hand, can seamlessly navigate to stores that are most convenient for them, based on their location and preferred travel mode. This feature saves valuable time and enhances their overall brand experience. Brands in the Retail, QSR, Automotive, and Grocery industries find this format highly valuable.

Creating Unique Experiences with Locala

At Locala, we specialize in creating unique and impactful experiences for our clients’ marketing campaigns. Our skilled design team works closely with clients to develop customized solutions that align with their specific goals and objectives. Whether it’s for mobile, DOOH, desktop or CTV, we are dedicated to delivering a high-quality and creative design that drives results.

To learn more about the convenience and accessibility of The Store Navigator, contact us today!

Introducing The Flyer

Locala is thrilled to announce the release of our latest innovative ad format, The Flyer! The Flyer enables advertisers to deliver an interactive catalog experience in a digital, omnichannel environment. Moreover, users can discover and engage with new products and deals in a sustainable, eco-friendly way, while advertisers can directly measure the impact of their marketing investments.

How it Works

Using The Flyer format, users are presented with an engaging ad that includes a prompt to explore a brand’s catalog and offers. When clicked on, users are taken to an interactive environment where they can directly engage with a large variety of products and deals. The Flyer is an omnichannel ad format available across Mobile, Desktop and DOOH (Digital Out-of-Home) channels.

The Benefits

A common roadblock with traditional printed flyers is the inability to effectively track the impact of marketing dollars. With The Flyer, advertisers can increase brand awareness and drive consumer engagement by tracking and optimizing campaign performance in a digital environment. And as consumers and businesses become more environmentally conscious, the eco-friendly nature of the digital Flyer can help brands reach their sustainability goals.

Users can also easily connect and shop with brands without the need to download a retailer’s app or search for a brand’s product or discount online, creating a smooth user experience. This format is particularly valuable for advertisers in the Retail, Grocery and Automotive industries.

Creating Unique Experiences with Locala

To learn more about the convenience and accessibility of The Flyer, contact us today!

Introducing the Click-to-Text

April 27th, 2023 – Article by Mary Layden

Locala is very excited to release our latest innovative mobile ad format called the Click-to-Text. The Click-to-Text is designed to assist advertisers in increasing brand awareness while enabling users to easily initiate contact in an automated environment that encourages long-term brand engagement at scale. This feature also allows customers to communicate with brands effortlessly through an application they’re already using, as opposed to filling out a traditional contact form.

How it Works

With the Click-to-Text format, users are prompted with an ad that features a call to action. When clicked on, users are asked to verify if they’d like to send a text message. When selecting yes, a pre-written text message is generated in their messaging app, addressed to the advertiser’s phone number or short code.

The Benefits

The Click-to-Text is beneficial for both advertisers and the user experience. Advertisers can use click-to-text ads to generate leads, engage with potential customers, and provide customer support. Users, on the other hand, can easily connect with businesses without having to navigate through a website or make a phone call. We have found this format to be particularly valuable for advertisers in the Retail, Automotive, Grocery, QSR and Home & Furniture industries.

Creating Unique Experiences with Locala

To learn more about the convenience and accessibility of Click-to-Text, contact us today!

The Importance of UX Design on Ad Platforms

Learn why Sophie Delrot, VP Design at AskLocala, believes good UX design is key when creating an ad platform that actually performs – especially for small and medium businesses.

Digital advertising has gone through many stages of evolution throughout the years. However, ever since programmatic—that is, data-driven, automated, digital—ad buying has become the norm for the vast majority of all ad spending, UX design has largely been forgotten as an essential element of advertising-platform design. This is the case primarily because highly skilled, experienced traders are now operating the actual campaigns, so there is little need to create intuitive, easy-to-use platforms. If you are an agency or brand with sufficient resources to hire dedicated staff, this is completely fine. However, this means businesses that have smaller budgets often encounter severe challenges when it comes to entering into the digital-consumer activation space.

By enhancing the user experience, we can democratize advertising technology … by offering SMBs a glide path for growth.
All too often, companies develop advertising platforms without a proper focus on the user. A recognition that UX design is essentially about solving problems for human beings is critical. This seems so obvious. Nevertheless, the fundamental role of UX design often gets forgotten. As a consequence, UX design often takes a path that presents users with convoluted, even frustrating experiences.

The implications of a bad user experience can be nothing short of existential. Dominant platforms such as Facebook and Google, among others, are typically hard to use, creating a barrier to entry for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs). A business consequence is often predatory behavior and the resultant chaos that clouds what success should look like. By enhancing the user experience, we can democratize advertising technology, or ad tech, by offering SMBs a glide path for growth.

As someone who has built a product-design department at an ad-tech company from scratch, I’ve learned three core principles that are critical to creating a dynamic, sustainable design sensibility for our industry.

Accessibility Is Paramount
By accessibility, we mean aspiring to design a friction-free user experience for all….
By accessibility, we mean aspiring to design a friction-free user experience for all—the user-experience version of utopia. According to Donald Norman, the godfather of emotional design, “Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”

But too many designers make human beings adapt to the designs they’ve conjured, which are, all too often, based on their own personal aesthetic. It really shouldn’t take someone ten minutes to figure out how to run a dishwasher or open a door. Our goal should be products that are seamless, whose use is instantaneous and easy. UX designers must adapt to human needs.

The UX designer’s ability to anticipate and meet all of the users’ relevant needs with one product design is tantamount to a formula for making your advertising platform more successful.
As ad-tech companies more fully embrace subscription models in the post-cookie era, the Software as a Service (SaaS) marketplace translates to more hands on keyboards in business-to-business (B2B) companies. This typically means a more diverse multitude of users who might have very different needs. The challenge and the opportunity for UX designers lies in designing keyboard navigation and typography—all in service of superior user experiences that are not uniform. Thus, the UX designer’s ability to anticipate and meet all of the users’ relevant needs with one product design is tantamount to a formula for making your advertising platform more successful.

Efficiency Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Speed
People often conflate productivity with efficiency. Why take eight hours to design something when you can get the work done in two? Because there is value in taking your time to get the design right. If designers are truly serious about the user experience, spending the extra time pays off in the long term. A frictionless user experience could become their calling card. Being efficient while designing the right user experience requires balancing insights that you’ve gleaned directly from users as well as analytics data.

As UX designers, our job is often combining our gut instincts with just the right amount of pragmatism. This means breaking complex tasks down into simple digestible steps to help reduce the user’s mental load. You must design user experiences through your clients’ eyes.

Invest the time necessary to truly understand the users’ challenges and identify patterns that guide them in overcoming their hurdles. So much of effective UX design stems from delving deeply into user psychology. This thorough spade work prepares the ground for creating a user experience that meets users’ needs. Design a button and place it at the top of the screen where users can see it. Not because of some arbitrary choice that is based on your personal aesthetic.

Utility Plus Desirability Equals User Engagement
Creating desire among our users is our overarching raison d’etre because ad-tech users are human beings, not bots.
Utility, in and of itself, is not the be-all-and-end-all. After all, for those of us in the ad-tech business, our core purpose is to inspire, aspire, and persuade. Creating desire among our users is our overarching raison d’etre because ad-tech users are human beings, not bots. In these chaotic times, which offer so many different options, human beings engage with brands experientially. It’s not enough for a jeans brand to make good-looking pants; they must manufacture their products with respect for the planet and the ultimate wearer of their jeans. Otherwise, they’ll go elsewhere.

Desirability that is rooted in a company’s values is as critical in B2B as in B2C (business-to-consumer). We are living in a truly pivotal period of the ad-tech business and the broader world. Sustainability and purpose are words that are on everyone’s lips. I may be biased, but I think humane, ethical UX design must be a fundamental part of everyone’s mission going forward. And by the way, having a good user experience is also good business.
Originally posted on UXmatters

Locala Launches New Ad Format: The Expandable

Even a great ad can miss the mark if it isn’t delivered in the right context. The right format can help you effectively communicate with your consumers, helping you to reach your goal of increased in-store or online visits.

At Locala we understand that an ad format can be just as powerful as the messaging it is delivering. That’s why we’ve launched our Expandable format — an impactful way to boost awareness for your brand, providing a seamless and engaging way to reach users.

The Expandable can help brands increase site visits and brand recall through combining formats that integrate seamlessly into a mobile users’ activities with dynamic messaging.

How it works:

Users are delivered an MPU or banner ad within their feed. These powerful formats provide native-like content experiences that are user-friendly and ensure the audience has positive viewing. Engaged users can click to expand the messaging into a full page creative that showcases your brand or products before accessing your mobile site or a real-time store locator to your nearest location. Each step is developed in a way that can be tracked to ensure the user’s engagement, making sure you see the return on ad spend.

This is a smart way for brands to upgrade a standard MPU or banner ad and capitalize on a more engaged audience. The Expandable guarantees all the reach of those formats, ensuring that your brand has a better chance of being seen by users in premium environments while providing the information of a full screen, more dynamic format.

The Expandable’s impactful combination of effective formats with powerful video messaging allows brands to be thoughtful about how they are engaging users, all while helping you to drive footfall to your physical location or online stores.

To learn more about the Expandable, watch this short video.

Drive customers to your store with Locala’s new ‘Mosaic’ ad format

At Locala, we create all our ad formats with the consumer in mind. Our goal is for shoppers to engage with your ad and visit your stores. And to successfully help you do that, we’ve released a new format – Mosaic.

Designed to create an immersive user experience, the Mosaic ad format merges video and image content with an interactive product slider and the address of your nearest store. It’s the perfect format to help you raise awareness of multiple products within a specific collection, or to showcase one high-value product from several angles and with more detail.

Mosaic goes above and beyond to offer shoppers a new level of product information to drive traffic to your stores. By combining distinct content tiles with our Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) feature, Mosaic helps shoppers explore your products and identify your closest store location. If shoppers want to go ahead and see the product in-store, they can click on your call-to-action to be redirected to a store locator landing page.

To make sure your ad fits your needs, you can make use of Mosaic’s interchangeable ad formats and choose to have it display either as:

an interstitial – an interactive, full screen ad that will appear on your shoppers’ screens at the most convenient time during their browsing journey (right);
or an MPU – a square in-feed ad which integrates seamlessly into the mobile user’s activity, just like a native content experience (left).

Mosaic’s innovative way of showcasing your products keeps your brand top of mind, offers shoppers the immersive brand experience they want, all while helping you drive footfall to your stores. And with the Holiday season fast approaching, that’s never been more important.

To learn more about Mosaic, watch this short video.

Locala Launches New Multi-Store DCO ad format to help consumers identify the closest range of retailers

Locala announces today the release of a pioneering ad format, the Multi-Store DCO. This innovative ad format combines branded product content with a Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) feature to engage with consumers and help them identify the closest selection of retailers.

Intuitive by design, this new format is very easy for shoppers to navigate. Within the ad experience, they are exposed to a ranked list of stores where they can find the product. The store locations displayed are determined by their physical proximity to shoppers, with the closest store appearing first. In a second step, shoppers can click on the store best suiting their needs (direction of travel, closeness…), which initiates directions to open directly within the map application installed on their device.

The advantage of the Multi-Store DCO is twofold for advertisers. They can raise awareness of their products as well as promote a localized selection of brand-owned stores at the same time. With this new ad format, brands now have a smart way of delivering the hyper localized interactions consumers crave.

This format is particularly interesting for brands whose products are sold in larger department stores. Indeed, the Multi-Store DCO is a fail-proof tool to help them increase their visibility, and that of their products, in an environment where shoppers are overwhelmed with choice.

This consumer-centric approach not only raises awareness of a specific product, but also of multiple points of sale. By highlighting stores that are geographically relevant to each shopper, the Multi-Store DCO provides practical assistance for product purchase.

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To learn more about our new Multi-Store DCO ad format, watch this video.

Locala Launches New Ad Format to Boost Store Visits with Mobile Wallet Passes

Locala announces today the release of a brand-new ad format, the Pass-to-Store. The creative new ad format provides advertisers with a method to drive incremental in-store visits with smart push notifications to engage with their audience at a specific time and date.

With this new ad experience, shoppers download a card with a promotion or invitation offered by an advertiser, which is then saved directly into their mobile phone wallet, compatible with both Android and Apple. The ad can be designed to offer event tickets, promotions, discounts or a simple sales reminder. Once the card is saved in the user’s wallet, the Pass-to-Store ad can trigger a notification to remind consumers of their available offer.

With the Pass-to-Store, an automotive dealership hosting an open house can trigger reminder notifications to consumers on a pre-determined day and time ahead of the event.

Notifications are pushed directly from the user’s wallet application, essentially acting as owned media for brands to retarget users that have interacted with their ad. Now, advertisers can effectively re-engage consumers by strategically delivering communications at a given time or date to increase the chance of incremental in-store visits and create more effective ad experiences.

“We are very excited by the release of the new Pass-to-Store format. It is the perfect technology to bridge online advertising at scale with what consumers are experiencing in real-time, at a very local and targeted level. Brands can stay top of mind with their consumers by being able to focus their efforts where their retail stores and locations actually are!” Christophe Collet, Founder and CEO.

To learn more about our new Pass-to-Store ad format, watch this short video.

Read the news in English in Mobile Marketing Magazine and MarTech Series, in French in MMA and CB News, in Italian in Programmatic Italia and Dailyonline and in Spanish in Marketing Directo and La Publicidad.