Clare Moss, Author at Locala

Stop the Guesswork: The 2026 Retail Planning Checklist

As the consumer journey becomes increasingly complex, retail marketers are struggling to reconcile high expectations for seamless service with the need to prove tangible return on investment (ROI). The traditional planning model, which relies on broad national assumptions, is no longer sustainable.

If your 2026 plan still starts with ‘target audience’ instead of ‘target context,’ it’s already outdated.

Mastering next year requires a strategic pivot to granular, localized intelligence that unifies planning and activation. This 10-point planning checklist provides the essential, actionable mandate for retail marketers to eliminate guesswork, achieve true cross-channel harmony, and ensure every dollar spent drives demonstrable business outcomes.

1. Ditch the “One-Size-Fits-All” Model

Retail marketers often overlook critical differences in local consumer behavior, resulting in wasted ad spend and ineffective campaigns. Applying a one-size-fits-all approach ignores the reality that consumer preferences, brand affinity, competition, and mobility patterns vary dramatically across regions, even between neighborhoods.

This lack of nuance is costly. Analysts estimate that up to 37% of ad spend is wasted, largely because campaigns lack the granular, contextual insights that reflect real shopping patterns. These generic, non-contextual campaigns lead to low consumer attention, a direct symptom of poor planning.

To succeed in 2026, embracing a localized strategy is non-negotiable for ensuring your campaigns resonate with the right consumers, in the right moment, in the right place.

2. Treat Every Location as Its Own Unique Market

For your 2026 plan to be effective, every region must be treated as a unique, nuanced environment. Your brand’s strategic mission in a market where you are a leader is vastly different from a market where you are a challenger. This shift demands localized intelligence.

Relevance is everything, starting with understanding where your audience is and how that context shapes their behavior. Locala’s localized approach ensures campaigns are more relevant and impactful, driving better engagement and stronger ROI. The Locala Planning platform empowers marketers to fine-tune strategies using real-world consumer insights—mobility, brand affinity, intent, and sociodemographic data—making it easier to reach the right audience in the right place at the right time.

3. Bridge the Gap Between Online and Offline Brand Engagement Data

Our recent study with eMarketer proved what many marketers feel daily: the modern consumer journey is fluid. 71% of consumers find products online and buy in-store while 68% do the reverse. They expect seamless, cross-channel experiences as they move between online devices and physical stores. To meet this demand, your media strategy cannot rely on siloed insights.

Locala bridges this critical gap with Omni Planner, a solution built to help marketers create smarter, locally relevant campaigns with ease. The platform combines digital and real-world engagement signals to map local omnichannel dynamics, giving you a complete, unified view of shopper behavior.

By measuring the interplay between your online activity (Awareness and Engagement) and your offline performance (local foot traffic and Preference), Omni Planner provides actionable intelligence. This empowers you to generate insight-led media strategies that drive impact at the market level, eliminating disconnected tools and manual planning.

4. Benchmark Against Competitors in Every Market

Seeing your own brand performance is useless without competitive context. To truly win in 2026, you must benchmark your online and offline health against your true local competitors, not just your national rivals.

Locala solves this by bridging competitive signals across online engagement and in-store foot traffic, leveraging Cross-Visitation insights to analyze shopper behavior. This granular view reveals “at-risk” zones where you may be losing share, and translates those signals into actionable, local media strategies. For instance, if a competitor is gaining ground in Toronto, the platform guides you to run a precise conquest strategy tailored to the needs of that area. This deep insight makes it simple to optimize your targeting market-by-market for greater national success.

5. Choose the Right Media Mix for Your Audience

Different channels perform better in different environments, making media mix optimization essential for driving local business outcomes. Instead of spreading your budget evenly, your 2026 plan must allocate spend based on localized performance and opportunity.

Locala ensures brands maximize engagement by optimizing campaigns based on media receptivity. This predictive insight identifies the most impactful channels—whether it’s display, DOOH, audio, or CTV—in each specific market. By tailoring your strategies to the channels consumers are most receptive to, you reach audiences more effectively and efficiently, ensuring every dollar is invested where the impact is highest.

6. Master Cross-Channel Harmony

Today’s consumer interacts with brands across mobile, desktop, DOOH, social, and CTV. If your campaigns lack a unified strategy, you risk inconsistent messaging, confusing your audience, and missing opportunities to engage.

Activation must be about cross-channel harmony, not just multi-channel presence. Locala specializes in propelling campaign performance by crafting personalized, immersive experiences using omnichannel creatives. We connect with consumers at the most impactful moments—whether they are on the move or engaging with digital content—ensuring the right message is delivered at the right time through the right channels to maximize attention and drive results.

7. Combine DOOH with Mobile for Maximum Impact.

Did you know that combining DOOH with mobile can increase brand recall by 2x and deliver a 303% increase in reach? This approach blends the high-impact reach of Digital Out-of-Home with the precision and measurement of mobile advertising to maximize conversions.

To ensure success, predictive planning is essential. With DOOH Scoring, you can predict exactly where your ads will make the biggest impact before you launch. Locala uses real-time passerby data and advanced audience insights to optimize placements, eliminating wasted spend and ensuring your message reaches the right person at the right time.

8. Align Creative Strategy Directly with Business KPIs.

The goal of your campaign must be reflected in every creative element. When the call-to-action (CTA) is misaligned—such as directing users to a website when the KPI is driving store visits—it creates confusion, hinders conversion, and wastes resources.

Prior to launch, clearly define the KPI and ensure creative guides consumers to the desired outcome. For example, if driving store visits is the goal, leverage formats like The Store Navigator to provide seamless, personalized directions to the nearest location. If boosting engagement is the KPI, formats like the Coupon Downloader can deliver personalized promotions to drive immediate action and loyalty.

9. Focus on Business Outcomes, Not Vanity Metrics

Traditional metrics like impressions and clicks, without context, often misrepresent campaign success and lead to wasted budgets. To succeed in 2026, marketers must move beyond vanity metrics and demand answers to critical business questions: How many visits did my campaign drive? and What was my Cost Per Visit (CPV)?

Locala’s advanced measurement and AI-driven insights provide a clear understanding of campaign impact. Instead of focusing solely on impressions, we prioritize efficiency by tracking real-world metrics like Foot Traffic Measurement and Sales Lift Analysis. By optimizing toward CPV, Locala ensures ad spend is directly tied to measurable consumer action and meaningful business success.

10. Close the Loop: Report and Learn in Every Market

Measurement is useless if it doesn’t inform the future. Marketers must shift from simple media reports to a true learning loop that continuously optimizes the next planning cycle.

Locala ensures this happens by providing granular attribution and omnichannel reporting that ties business outcomes directly back to the local area where campaigns ran. These consumer learnings and real-time insights allow brands to understand the precise impact of their marketing dollars, ensuring campaigns are continuously optimized and future activations are designed for maximum success.

The 2026 Mandate: From Checklist to Competitive Edge

The mandate for 2026 is clear: success hinges on unifying data, embracing predictive planning, and demanding granular attribution tied to local outcomes. By adopting this 10-point checklist, retail marketers move beyond siloed planning and guesswork, positioning themselves to capture local market share and maximize efficiency. These foundational steps also prepare brands for the emerging Agentic era of advertising, where AI-driven campaign automation will rely on the clean, unified data platforms provide.

Getting Started

At Locala, we help brands switch from generic targeting to context-driven media strategies, built on real signals and adapted to local dynamics.

If you’re ready for your media to reflect your brand’s ambition in every local context
If you want to know where and how to grow, not just who to reach
If you’re done running the same campaign everywhere…

Request a demo today to discover how Locala’s unified planning platform can help your teams plan smarter, activate with precision, and continuously optimize campaigns for maximum measurable impact.

Key Trends Shaping the 2026 Canadian Retail Landscape

Canadian retail is at a decisive turning point. Facing a challenging economy, marketers are navigating a year of tough trade-offs and bold innovation. The winners in 2026 will be those who strike the proper balance between AI-powered personalization, long-term engagement, and profitability.

But you can’t build this strategy on assumptions. To find out what’s really driving the market, we surveyed 1,000 Canadian shoppers to power our 2025-2026 Canadian Retail Barometer, a definitive analysis of what’s shaping the year ahead for retail in Canada.

The report dives deep into 14 key trends, but we’re breaking down four of the most critical takeaways for marketers right here:

The expansion of omnichannel strategies.
The rise of ‘phygital’ experiences.
The new reality of AI-driven hyper-personalization.
The strategic shift to hyperlocal commerce.

Here’s a closer look at each of these critical trends and, more importantly, what they mean for your advertising strategy in the year ahead.

1. Omnichannel Strategies Expand

Shopping is now fully omnichannel. The distinction between “online” and “offline” no longer exists in the consumer’s mind. Our new data confirms this, revealing that 70% of consumers favor a seamless shopping experience between a brand’s different channels. To meet these high expectations, brands have no choice but to adopt a unified omnichannel approach—one that connects their online store and in-store experience into a single, consistent journey.

For marketers, this means the future of media is not about chasing the cheapest impression. It’s about aligning with how people actually shop. This fragmented customer journey requires a new strategy built for an omnichannel, mobile, and local reality. The brands that adapt their advertising to connect these dots will be the ones that thrive.

2. Phygital, the best of both worlds

The walls between online and in-store shopping are gone. Our survey data shows this clearly: while 69% of Canadians still shop primarily in physical stores, 72% are using their smartphones while in-store to check reviews or find offers. This fading line between physical and digital retail is the new ‘phygital’ reality. Brands are using experiences like in-store QR codes and AR to deliver frictionless journeys, which can boost loyalty by 30%. This intelligent integration, letting a customer order online and pick up in-store, for example, is what reduces friction and speeds up conversion.

For advertisers, this means a siloed strategy is no longer an option. You need a unified view of your customer, both online and off. This is precisely why Locala created the Omni Planner, a new layer inside our planning tool. It was built to reflect how people actually shop, unifying online signals with offline outcomes on the same canvas. It gives you a complete view of these fluid journeys by providing:

A unified view of online and offline engagement data to drive clear, cross-environment insights.
Competitive benchmarks that reveal how performance stacks up across digital and real-world environments.
Localized, scalable media plans without the hassle of manual market-by-market planning.

3. Hyper-personalization Becomes Reality

Today’s Canadian shoppers don’t just appreciate personalized experiences—they now expect them. 62% of Canadians are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their experiences. Thanks to machine learning and smart planning tools, brands now have the ability to finely decode each consumer’s expectations, behaviors, and preferences in real-time. The impact is significant, with AI-driven personalization proven to increase conversion rates by 20% to 30%.

This capability fundamentally changes the brand-consumer relationship. Successful brands no longer just interact with their audiences; they integrate into their daily lives. This deep, real-time understanding nurtures loyalty because the customer feels recognized, understood, and valued. For advertisers, this means using these tools to ensure that whether a customer is shopping online or in-store, their experience is seamless, contextualized, and consistent.

4. The Shift to Hyperlocal Commerce

Finally, all of these trends must be executed at the local level. Our survey found that 34% of Canadians plan to buy more local products in the future, confirming a powerful shift towards hyperlocal, values-driven retail. This trend means a national campaign with a single, generic message is no longer effective. Winning in Canada means winning market-by-market.

For advertisers, this shift requires a new level of relevance. Instead of broad, national campaigns, brands must now use localized insights to plan, activate, and optimize their media. This hyperlocal approach, which aligns messaging with local behavior, is the key to proving brand relevance and capturing local market share.

From Insights to Action with Locala

Understanding these trends is the first step. Winning in 2026 requires putting them into action.

The Canadian retail market is complex, but the solution doesn’t have to be. Locala’s platform is designed for this new ‘phygital’ reality. We help you:

Connect with real shoppers: Using privacy-first data to understand consumer behavior, online and in-store.
Activate your hyperlocal strategy: Delivering personalized, relevant ads to any Canadian market, at scale.
Measure what matters: Moving beyond clicks to measure real-world business outcomes, like store visits.

Get the Full 2026 Outlook

These four trends are just the beginning. The full Canadian Retail Barometer provides a deep dive into all 14 trends, critical insights on data protection, and actionable case studies from Canadian leaders.

Download the complete Canadian Barometer report to get all the insights.

[Download Now]

Introducing Omni Planner: Unifying Online and Offline Engagement Data for Smarter Media Strategies

Planning a media campaign shouldn’t feel like stitching together disconnected tools or wrestling with fragmented data. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Omni Planner, Locala’s newest solution built to unify online and offline engagement data and help marketers create smarter, more locally relevant campaign strategies with ease.

Whether you’re launching a national rollout or fine-tuning a city-by-city approach, Omni Planner gives you the clarity and control to do it better. And faster.

The Problem with Traditional Planning

Marketers today face growing pressure to prove performance across increasingly complex campaigns. With more channels, more data, and tighter timelines, planning has become one of the most resource-draining parts of the media process.

Yet most planning tools still fail to bridge the gap between online and offline engagement. They rely on fragmented systems and outdated workflows, forcing teams to piece together insights, build manual market plans, and make critical decisions without a full picture.

It’s like navigating with only half a map and no compass; you can move forward, but you’re more likely to take wrong turns, miss opportunities, and waste time (and budget) retracing your steps.

So we gathered our most trusted experts in planning, data, and product design to ask: how do we make media planning easier and more impactful for modern marketers? What we landed on is something we’re really proud of: Omni Planner. A smarter, more intuitive way to plan in a fragmented world.

Why Omni Planner, and Why Now?

Today’s consumer journey doesn’t follow a single path. People switch between devices, storefronts, and experiences without skipping a beat. Their behavior is fluid, and their expectations are very high.

That reality demands more than static rollout strategies, and siloed insights won’t get you there. To truly resonate, marketers need to understand not just what people do, but where, when, and why they engage.

Omni Planner was designed for this new era. By combining digital and real-world engagement signals, it gives marketers the ability to see the full picture and plan campaigns that reflect how people actually live, shop, and make decisions, market by market, moment by moment.

What You Can Do With Omni Planner

With Omni Planner, your team can:

Get a unified view of audience behavior across physical and digital touchpoints
Benchmark your performance to understand how you stack up against competitors in each market
Generate localized, scalable media plans—without tedious, manual planning
Adapt campaign strategies to regional realities in just a few clicks

Seamlessly integrated into our planning framework, Omni Planner adds a powerful layer of intelligence that helps us plan and deliver campaigns with greater speed, adaptability, and impact, empowering marketers to outperform, market by market.

So, How Does it Work?

Omni Planner analyzes performance across two key environments: online and offline. Within each, it looks at two critical pillars of consumer behavior—giving marketers a complete view of how audiences discover, interact with, and choose their brand.

In the offline world, Omni Planner measures:

Attractiveness – your share of local foot traffic
Preference – your ability to retain or win store visits versus competitors

In the online space, it captures:

Awareness – your share of website traffic in a market
Engagement – what people actually do once they land on your site

By understanding the interplay of these four performance pillars, Omni Planner helps you uncover where you’re strong, where you’re losing ground, and why. It then uses that intelligence to generate localized, insight-led media strategies that drive impact at the market level—without the need for spreadsheets, disconnected tools, or time-consuming manual planning.

It’s a smarter, more strategic way to scale what works and fine-tune what doesn’t—giving you full control, without the resource drain.

Built on Proven Results

While the feature itself is new, the methodology behind Omni Planner isn’t. Brands that have already used a localized, engagement-based approach have seen:

📈 A 25% increase in attention
💡 A 70% lift in brand preference
🛍️ A 30% boost in store visitation

Those aren’t just metrics, they’re proof that smarter planning leads to better business outcomes.

See Omni Planner in Action

Want to know what unified planning actually looks like?
We’d love to show you.

Explore how Omni Planner connects online and offline data, localizes strategy at scale, and simplifies campaign planning—step by step.

Book a customized demo

Introducing Story – The Mobile Ad Format That Feels Like Social Media

Introducing our newest format: Interstitial Story

We are excited to announce the launch of Interstitial Story, Locala’s latest mobile-first ad format designed to emulate the engaging experience of social media stories. This innovative format allows brands to connect with audiences through familiar, interactive storytelling techniques.

What is the Interstitial Story?

Story lets advertisers showcase up to three images or videos in sequence, with a timeline at the top that mimics social media stories. Users can tap to revisit previous content, ensuring full engagement, while forward skipping is disabled to maintain narrative flow. Brands can specify each slide’s duration to control the pacing of their message.

Driving User Engagement

Story’s familiar design creates a seamless experience, especially for younger, tech-savvy audiences. Brands can choose between CTA buttons or swipe-up gestures to direct users to desired landing pages and boost conversions.

Versatility Across Industries

While Story is especially effective in engaging younger demographics familiar with social media, its adaptable nature makes it suitable for a wide range of industries. Whether you’re in retail, travel, or any sector aiming to combine visuals and narrative, Story offers a dynamic platform to showcase your brand’s message.

Creating Unique Experiences with Locala

At Locala, we craft impactful advertising solutions that align with our clients’ objectives. Our experienced design team collaborates closely with brands to develop customized Story ad experiences that align with specific campaign goals. From concept to execution, we ensure high-quality, engaging content that drives results.

Ready to elevate your next campaign? Contact us today to explore how Interstitial Story can boost your brand visibility.

Introducing the Panel Optimizer:
The Latest Breakthrough in DOOH Advertising

Tired of playing the guessing game?

What if you could predict exactly where your DOOH ads will make the biggest impact, before you even launch your campaign? Imagine knowing not just who your audience is, but where they’ll be and when they’re most likely to see your message. With Locala’s Panel Optimizer, this vision is now a reality. Our new feature delivers real-time, data-driven scoring, empowering you to place your ads with precision and maximize the reach of every campaign.

From Challenges to Innovation: The Story of the Panel Optimizer

In a world where consumers are constantly on the move, knowing exactly when and where to place your ads is crucial. But without precise targeting, too many DOOH ads end up in locations where a significant portion of the audience may not be relevant or interested in the message. It’s like casting a super wide net, and then just hoping to catch the right fish, often coming up empty.

The Panel Optimizer addresses this challenge by scoring each DOOH panel based on your audience’s Opportunity to See (OTS). This means you can pinpoint high-impact panels and times, helping you make more informed decisions about your media spend. No more guesswork, just clear, actionable insights that optimize your reach and boost campaign performance.

How the Panel Optimizer Works:
The Panel Optimizer simplifies the complexities of DOOH buying with three key capabilities:

Who: Identify the areas with the highest concentration of your ideal audience using advanced sociodemographic data.
Where: Pinpoint the exact panels and inventory types that align with where your audience is most likely to be.
When: Leverage real-time passerby data to serve your ads at optimal times, maximizing their visibility and impact.

Step 1: Select Your Audience

With Locala’s AI-powered Planning tool, we’ll define your audience using sociodemographic data and pinpoint key regions to ensure your ads reach the right people.

Step 2: Define Target Area & Inventory

Further refine your planning by selecting target areas and inventory. Locala’s platform identifies panels in real-time, ensuring your ads reach relevant locations and minimize waste.

Step 3: Activate DOOH Scoring

With DOOH Scoring, the Panel Optimizer uses real-time data to score panels based on Likelihood to See (LTS), helping you focus spend on the most impactful placements for efficient, effective campaigns.

Step 4: Refine & Optimize
Refine your audience with behavioral segments to make campaigns more dynamic. The platform continuously updates DOOH Scores in real-time, ensuring maximum impact.

Step 5: Measure & Adjust

Monitor real-time performance metrics and make data-driven adjustments during your campaign, ensuring it delivers optimal results from start to finish.

With these insights, brands can activate DOOH campaigns that truly resonate with their target audience, driving results without wasting budget.

A New Standard in DOOH Scoring:

At Locala, we believe that the metrics that drive success in digital advertising—like viewability and attention—should also apply to DOOH. That’s why our DOOH Scoring isn’t just about identifying available inventory; it’s about using real-time data to understand your audience’s behavior and ensuring your message hits at the most effective moments. With the Panel Optimizer, your DOOH campaigns become more than just ads—they become tailored experiences that connect with consumers effectively in the real world.

The Edge You Need in the DOOH World

With the Panel Optimizer, brands will target only the panels that align with their audience, eliminating wasted spend and increasing efficiency. This approach broadens reach and amplifies impact, delivering ads at the right moments to capture attention. Backed by real-time insights, marketers make confident decisions, ensuring their strategies stay responsive, data-driven, and optimized for success.

Start Benefiting from DOOH Panel Scoring Today

We’re proud to be at the forefront of DOOH innovation, helping brands navigate the evolving landscape with tools that make their campaigns more effective and impactful. With the Panel Optimizer, we’re offering a new way to reach audiences in the moments that matter most. Let’s make your next campaign the best one yet.

Whether you’re looking to refine your targeting, increase campaign impact, or make smarter media buys, the Panel Optimizer unlocks the full potential of DOOH Scoring. Ready to see it in action? Contact us today to learn more about what this means for your brand.

3 Simple Steps to Boost
Your Brand’s Impact This Holiday Season

The 2024 holiday season is shaping up to be a big one for Canadian retailers. Holiday spending in Canada is expected to rise by about 10%, reaching an average of $1,800 per person. With shoppers focused on finding value amid rising costs, a well-rounded holiday media strategy is essential to stand out and capture their attention.

To begin planning, marketers must ask themselves:

Who is my campaign targeting?
Where can I find them?
How can I engage consumers?
What results can I expect?

By implementing an omnichannel approach that’s personalized to the local consumer, brands can effectively reach their target holiday shopper audiences while boosting visibility and engagement. Find out how Locala’s advertising platform with granular insights and cutting-edge AI is key to ensuring your campaigns deliver actionable results.

Step #1 Understand Your Target Audience with Locala’s Audience Explorer

The first step in planning your campaign is to clearly identify and understand who and where your target audience is. Canadian consumers are increasingly selective about where they spend their holiday budgets, focusing on brands that offer strong value and rewards. With Locala’s Audience Explorer, brands can utilize consumer data on demographics, interests, and behaviors, and specifically identify their key audience segments —whether they’re tech enthusiasts, holiday shoppers, or families with kids. By understanding the nuances of your audience, you can craft messages that resonate and ensure your campaign hits the mark.

Step #2 Activating the Right Channels for Maximum Impact

After identifying your target audience, the next crucial step in a killer holiday media strategy is to activate the most effective channels for reaching them. By combining Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) and Mobile, brands can significantly enhance their visibility and engagement during the holiday season.

Locala’s planning tool enables you to identify the areas with the highest affinity and strategically place DOOH screens in those locations. Location-based mobile outreach lets you retarget individuals who have already seen your DOOH ads. This extends your campaign’s reach while reinforcing your brand message across platforms. The result is a cohesive and memorable consumer experience. This omnichannel approach ensures that your brand stays top-of-mind as consumers make their holiday shopping decisions.

Step #3 Creating Engaging and Memorable Experiences

We measure a successful campaign not just by the number of impressions it generates, but by how well it creates an engaging and resonant experience with consumers.

Amplify your brand’s impact this holiday season by using large-format DOOH ads to capture broad attention. Complement this with mobile creative strategies to deepen engagement. Enhance the experience further by incorporating immersive “in-ad” video experiences and increase in-store traffic with features like the store navigator.

How a Beauty Brand Achieved Success with Locala

In preparation for the holiday season, a beauty brand launched a campaign aimed at expanding reach, boosting visibility, and driving in-store engagement across more than 500 stores. To achieve this, they partnered with Locala and implemented a powerful strategy where Large-format DOOH displays in high-traffic areas captured attention, while mobile ads re-targeted viewers to encourage in-store visits.

The campaign targeted women aged 30+ nationwide, using data insights to pinpoint high-potential areas with strong brand affinity. It delivered ads within 500 meters of DOOH screens near key retailers to maximize in-store conversions.

The campaign delivered outstanding results, including a 70% viewability rate, a 5% uplift in in-store visits, and a 65% reduction in cost per visit compared to industry benchmarks. Additionally, mobile ads saw a 90% improvement in click-through rates versus the industry average, highlighting the campaign’s success in driving both visibility and engagement.

Make This Holiday Season Your Best Yet

The 2024 holiday season offers tremendous opportunities for Canadian brands ready to connect with consumers who value well-timed, relevant campaigns. By implementing a media strategy that aligns with key shopping dates and resonates with your core audiences, you can drive real results this season.

Why Locala?

With AI-driven insights, advanced reporting, and a global reach allowing localized activation, Locala enables brands to deliver impactful, omnichannel creative campaigns that resonate with consumers during the critical holiday season. Locala empowers brands to excel in their holiday marketing efforts through smart planning so that they can achieve effective engagement.

Contact us to learn more about how Locala can drive meaningful results and maximize your return on investment this holiday season.

Introducing MPU Scroll: A Dynamic Way to Elevate Brand Awareness

Introducing Our Newest Ad Format: MPU Scroll

We are thrilled to introduce our newest dynamic ad format: MPU Scroll. This new format elevates your brand’s visibility and engagement like never before.

What is the MPU Scroll?

The MPU Scroll adapts to user interaction without requiring direct engagement, making it a cutting-edge ad format. As users scroll through content, the MPU Scroll dynamically changes the image, creating an eye-catching, immersive experience. Additionally, Whether you’re looking to showcase a 360-degree view of a product, create smooth, scrolling animations, or tell a story through visuals, MPU Scroll offers unmatched versatility to bring your content to life.

Driving Real Engagement

This ad format is designed to enhance brand awareness by capturing attention through dynamic visuals that adapt to users’ scrolling behavior. Moreover, Unlike traditional formats, MPU Scroll offers fluid, interactive experiences that don’t require additional taps or clicks. It’s perfect for showing off products from all angles or adding depth to your campaign’s creative elements.

Flexible & Customizable

Furthermore, we take care of exporting the visuals, delivering up to 30 different frames for your animations or videos. The result is a flexible, highly customizable ad unit that perfectly fits your creative needs, whether it’s showcasing a 360-degree view or adding smooth animations. The MPU Scroll provides the ideal tool for engaging mobile users through a seamless app experience.

Delivering Impactful Solutions with Locala

At Locala, we’re dedicated to helping brands create memorable and effective marketing experiences. Our skilled design team works closely with clients to tailor ad solutions that meet specific campaign goals and objectives. Whether it’s mobile, DOOH, desktop to CTV, our innovative formats, like MPU Scroll, capture attention and drive meaningful engagement.

Ready to elevate your next campaign? Contact us today to explore how MPU Scroll can boost your brand visibility.

5 Advertising Best Practices
for Beauty Brands

As the beauty market continues to transform and diversify, understanding the varied needs and preferences of today’s complex consumers is more crucial than ever. From eco-conscious Gen Z shoppers to globe-trotting male beauty enthusiasts, the modern beauty buyer is a spectrum of unique personas, each with distinct tastes and expectations.

Brands must decipher these nuanced consumer profiles, and precise targeting strategies will be key to tailoring their offerings effectively. By adopting a personalized approach, beauty brands can deliver efficient campaigns that maximize every advertising dollar spent.

The Beauty Buyer’s Local Makeup:

When it comes to the beauty buyer’s local makeup, every location is different, so why use a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing? Local trends, even when they appear basic, like an area’s price sensitivity or visit frequency, can greatly shape the outcomes of brand campaigns.

To maximize ROI, beauty brands should shape their media mix, target audiences, creative strategies, and other initiatives based on their local audiences’ preferences. A hyper-targeted approach ensures that advertising efforts align with unique local market needs, thereby boosting effectiveness and efficiency.

In this blog post, we explore five best practices essential for driving growth through advertising in the beauty industry. These insights, combined with a localized and personalized strategy, can help your brand forge stronger relationships and drive lasting loyalty.

Best Practice #1: Optimize Attention – Becoming GenZ’s Preferred Choice

Brands must prioritize capturing and retaining the attention of Gen Z, the next generation of beauty enthusiasts with evolving preferences and high expectations.

Recent trends indicate a significant shift in beauty spending among teens, reaching its highest levels since spring 2018 with an annual spend of $339 per person, an 8% year-over-year growth. And despite the digital age, almost all teens still prefer shopping for beauty products in-store.

Given that Gen Z’s path to purchase is anything but straightforward, capturing their attention requires a truly multi-channel approach. So, how do you understand where and how these buyers shop as well as what motivates them? At Locala, we recommend the following two-step approach:

Step 1: Identifying and targeting Gen Z consumers at scale:

Understand where they spend their time and tailor your campaigns to these platforms. Analyze their online behaviors, geo-patterns, mobile app usage, geo-contextual influences, age data, and purchase habits. This multifaceted approach enables personalized, relevant campaigns that align with Gen Z’s unique needs and interests.

Step 2: Creating impactful digital ads:

To effectively engage Gen Z, it’s crucial that your digital ads are not only viewable but truly resonate with them on a deeper level. This involves crafting content that captures their attention beyond mere exposure, utilizing attention metrics to measure actual engagement. By ensuring your ads actively engage Gen Z, you can drive meaningful interactions that lead to higher conversion rates.

Best Practice #2: Intent-Based Delivery

Moving beyond broad geo-targeting, intent-based delivery focuses on where potential beauty shoppers are most likely to make purchases. At Locala, we enhance this approach by overlaying advanced affinity insights, integrating data on consumer preferences and past behaviors. This allows us to target your advertising spend towards locations and platforms where beauty shoppers have shown a clear interest in specific products.

By directing ads to consumers who already have a high affinity to your brand, we not only improve the efficiency of your campaigns but also boost the relevance of your ads, increasing the likelihood of conversion. This targeted strategy ensures that every ad dollar is invested wisely, fostering higher ROI and more meaningful customer engagements.

Best Practice #3: Last-mile Tactics: Mobile & DOOH Convergence

Combining mobile advertising with Digital Out of Home (DOOH) can powerfully guide beauty buyers through their purchasing journey, leading them directly to your doors. By leveraging mobile as the ‘last mile companion,’ you can extend the reach of your DOOH campaigns. This integration allows you to engage shoppers wherever they are, reinforcing brand messages and simplifying the customer journey with tools like mobile store navigators.

Personalized retargeting reinforces brand messages, while mobile store navigators enhance the customer experience. This approach effectively turns every mobile interaction into an opportunity to guide the consumer closer to a purchase, bridging the gap between online engagement and physical store visits.

Best Practice #4: Driving Travel Retail Sales

Targeting travelers in airports offers a unique opportunity for beauty brands to capitalize on a captive audience. Airports are high-traffic environments where travelers often have time to explore new products and make impulse purchases.

By utilizing geo-targeted mobile ads and Digital Out of Home (DOOH), brands can significantly enhance their visibility among this demographic. This strategic placement ensures that your advertising captures the attention of potential customers precisely when they are most receptive to discovering new beauty products.

Implementing this strategy effectively taps into the peak times for impulse buying, such as long wait times at departure gates or baggage claims. The key is to make these ads as relevant and compelling as possible, presenting offers that are tailored to the needs and interests of travelers, such as travel-sized beauty products that can be easily carried on flights.

By converting foot traffic into immediate sales opportunities, this approach not only boosts direct sales but also builds brand recognition in a global setting. Capturing a traveler’s interest can lead to ongoing engagement and loyalty, with customers potentially seeking out the brand even after their trip.

Best Practice #5: Boosting Customer Lifetime Value

At Locala, we understand that purchasing a product is just the beginning of the consumer journey. Using data-driven insights, we help brands retarget past buyers with personalized offers for enhanced loyalty and cross-sales. This strategy maximizes the lifetime value of each customer, transforming single sales into ongoing engagements.
Our approach involves continuously analyzing customer behavior and purchase history to craft offers that are not only timely but highly relevant to each individual. This targeted communication keeps your brand top-of-mind and encourages repeat purchases by making customers feel valued and understood.

By fostering a deeper connection with customers, we turn occasional buyers into loyal brand advocates. This not only increases the frequency of purchases but also enhances the overall profitability of each customer relationship over time.

Expertise that Drives Results: Locala’s Proven Track Record

With over a decade of experience in driving store traffic with omnichannel, location-based audience targeting for retail and beauty brands, Locala has mastered delivering successful campaigns grounded in data and innovation. Our expertise is proven through extensive real-world applications and satisfied clients.

From Planning to Attribution, Locala’s Got You Covered.

Plan: Uncover location-based insights about your brand and strategically plan your media campaigns to align with your objectives.
Activate: Build media strategies tailored to your business goals, activating omni channel campaigns that cover every stage of the customer journey.
Learn: Maximize campaign performance and return on ad spend (ROAS) through omnichannel attribution and real-time optimizations.

Let’s explore real-life success stories! How has a leading beauty brand like L’Occitane utilized location-based advertising to enhance in-store traffic and drive growth?”

How L’Occitane Leveraged Location-Based Advertising for Outstanding Results

L’Occitane en Provence, a leading global provider of natural beauty products, partnered with Locala to drive in-store traffic across their U.S. retail locations.

Locala targeted potential customers within a 15-minute drive or walk from L’Occitane stores using a tailored strategy with dynamic geo-location targeting and custom audience building. The campaign utilized innovative creatives featuring a store locator with real-time directions, simplifying the customer journey to the nearest store.

The results were impressive: the campaign generated nearly 8 million impressions and led to 43,952 store visits, showcasing the power of strategic location-based advertising. This approach not only enhanced L’Occitane’s visibility but also significantly boosted foot traffic, proving the effectiveness of Locala’s precise targeting and creative solutions in driving real-world outcomes.

Ready to see how Locala’s omnichannel advertising platform can transform your campaign results through deep consumer insights? Get in touch with us today!