Category: News

Singapore, 9 October 2025 – Locala, a global leader in omnichannel advertising solutions, showcased its thought leadership at Digital Marketing Asia (DMA) 2025 in Singapore, one of the region’s premier gatherings of senior marketing leaders and innovators. At the event, Locala launched its much-anticipated APAC Retail Insights 2025 Barometer, offering fresh perspectives on the evolving retail landscape and consumer expectations across the region.

DMA 2025 brought together over 500 senior decision-makers to discuss the future of marketing, with a strong focus on AI, data-backed strategy, evolving digital stacks, and unified consumer experiences. Locala’s participation underscored its commitment to helping brands bridge the gap between online and offline audiences, enabling smarter planning and measurable business outcomes.

During his keynote session, Vincent Pang, Managing Director APAC at Locala, delivered an insightful presentation titled “Channel-less Consumers: Bridging the ‘Who’ and ‘Where’ in Reaching Audiences Online, In-Store, and In Between.” He emphasized that in today’s retail environment, consumers no longer shop by channel, but instead expect seamless, personalized experiences wherever they are.

“Consumers are channel-less, but marketing strategies are still often channel-bound. This disconnect creates fragmented journeys, siloed data, and inefficiencies,” said Vincent Pang. “With our APAC Retail Insights 2025 Barometer, we aim to give brands a clearer view of how shoppers behave across markets, uncovering real signals that can drive meaningful engagement and business results.”

The APAC Retail Insights 2025 Barometer combines proprietary Locala research with regional consumer data to reveal key trends shaping retail in Asia-Pacific. Findings highlight the continued dominance of offline retail in markets such as Singapore, the growing prevalence of hybrid shopping journeys, and the rising demand for hyper-localized, context-driven strategies.

As part of the launch, Locala also introduced its innovative Omni Planner solution in Singapore, enabling marketers to operationalize Business Context Planning at scale. By leveraging both online and offline signals, brands can adapt their campaigns to specific geographies, competitive landscapes, and shopper journeys — ensuring precision, relevance, and reduced media waste.

Reflecting on the company’s participation at DMA 2025, Vincent added, “This was one of the biggest marketing events we’ve sponsored this year in Singapore, and it didn’t disappoint. We connected with brand leaders from across industries, gathered valuable feedback, and shared our vision for how localization and context-driven planning will shape the future of omnichannel retail.”

Locala’s APAC Retail Insights 2025 Barometer is now available for download, offering marketers an actionable guide to navigating the complexities of modern retail in Asia-Pacific.

About Locala

Locala’s omnichannel advertising platform leverages granular insights and cutting-edge AI to help marketers efficiently plan, activate, and measure campaigns personalized to the local consumer. Our platform specializes in transforming complex mobility and consumer data into actionable audience insights, fueling advanced media strategies that consistently deliver smarter business outcomes. Since its inception in 2012, Locala has proudly worked with leading brands across 40 countries. With over 180 employees around the globe, Locala has offices in the United States, France, Belgium, the UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Italy, Canada, and Dubai.

2020 was the most unpredictable year most retailers have ever seen. But one thing is for sure, after long months of successive lockdowns, closed shops and social distancing, customers are ready, willing and able to hit their favorite spots.

And today, the wait is finally over! Starting this week, Belgium will begin easing coronavirus restrictions in a bid to go back to normal and kick-start recovery. This is fantastic news for non-essential businesses such as fashion outlets, hairdressers, bars and restaurants, who saw their foot traffic decrease by 40% year-on-year because of the pandemic (COMEOS).

As we enter a phase where brands and retailers will welcome customers eager to go back to stores, this is prime time for you to re-engage with your audience on all levels and get them through your doors. Drive-to-store advertising is the perfect way for you to do so (yes it is, we wrote a whole handbook about that).

At Locala, we’re here to help your brand succeed. We want to see busy stores, popular restaurants and thriving car dealerships. By using Fusio, our drive-to-store platform, you can:

• Be top-of-mind for customers thanks to our proprietary and impactful ad formats.
• Reconnect with your audience through effective affinity targeting, granular audience clusters, and precise geotargeting.
• Get all the support you need with our campaign management tools.

Look at the results major brands like Volkswagen, Brico & BricoPlanit and Dr. Oetker achieved from running a drive-to-store campaign with Locala.

Get in touch with us to see how we can help you drive customers back to your stores, dealerships and restaurants.

Every year, French Tech 120 selects 120 promising French start-ups with the potential of becoming global technology leaders. We’re very proud to have made the cut for the second year in a row, which is a fantastic recognition of our drive-to-store technology.

Following a strange 2020, featuring in this list is even more meaningful. It is solid proof of the effectiveness of our platform and the strong foothold we’ve established in France. Our expansion into key European markets, as well as the US and Asia, has no doubt contributed to make us stand out among the hundreds of hopefuls for this 2021 edition. The awards we won throughout 2020 probably played in our favor too. Among them were: FrenchWeb’s FW500, Adweek’s Fastest Growing Solution Providers, The Drum Digital Advertising Awards, the MarTech Breakthrough Awards and the OMMA Awards.

We would not have achieved this without the work of our outstanding team and our award-winning drive-to-store technology, which have made Locala the worldwide leading platform it is today.

Congratulations to all the companies who have made it into this edition! Here’s to a year filled with new opportunities.

Whether you are starting your drive-to-store advertising journey or you are seasoned in increasing your store traffic, there’s one thing that is true: you need data to make the right decisions. 

In this case, you need visitation data for the stores where you are running campaigns to understand the impact across the board. But you need more than the number of visits coming from your campaign, you need the total number of visits for each store. Collect this data over time and you’ve got a solid understanding of the visitation patterns that govern each POI. 

Our new location intelligence tool, Retail Analytics, allows you to do just that and it presents your data in a series of useful graphs and charts. The insights come divided in two sections: store network level and individual store level, to make sure you have your big picture data as well as your granular information per store.

At the network level you’ll want to look at overarching patterns and trends that change with time:

Top and bottom performing stores 

Identify which ones could benefit from additional spend, or if a particular strategy has managed to push your store performance to the top tier.

Total and average number of visits per day

Two quick metrics to understand if your campaigns are having the desired effect.

Weekly and monthly visitation trends

An easy way to check your overall performance or to test drive-to-store campaigns and other media promotions in a few stores and understand the impact before launching to additional locations. 

When you’re looking at how each store is performing:

Week on week visits comparison

A great way to see the impact at the store level is to focus on whether this trend is going up or down. 

Armed with the power these insights give you, you’ll be able to:

• Increase traffic across the board by identifying stores that could benefit from running additional activities.
• Test your promotional activities and understand what worked well so that it can be repeated in other stores.
• Make sure your ad spend is effective when you compare footfall disparities of stores with heavy ad spend vs smaller budgets.
• Anticipate demand and improve the in-store customer experience by making sure your logistics and operations are ready to handle the influx of store traffic. 

This tool is part of our commitment to help retailers increase their in store foot traffic. Thanks to it, we are able to provide data beyond their campaign performance that truly helps them see the big picture and understand how to best approach their drive-to-store activities. 

If you are interested in learning more about this new solution or drive-to-store in general, get in touch.

IAB Europe has appointed Locala’s General Counsel Thomas Adhumeau chair of their TCF DPA outreach working group, as the body seeks formal approval of its Transparency and Consent Framework.

The DPA Outreach Working Group was set up by the TCF steering group to raise awareness and understanding of the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework among data protection authorities across Europe and in the UK.

The goal of the working group is to ensure the industry is able to engage with data protection authorities when necessary to address their questions and/or concerns with respect to the Framework. Any feedback received from data protection authorities is then shared with the Steering Group for further discussion. The aim is to continue to improve the TCF, so it can become an even better GDPR compliance tool for the advertising industry.

“I am pleased to be chairing the DPA outreach working group. We have a lot on our plate as data protection authorities across Europe release their guidelines outlining what they expect from the online advertising industry in terms of GDPR compliance. Formal approval of the TCF as a GDPR transnational Code of Conduct remains the goal. It’ll be a lot of work, but we are determined to make that happen”, shared Thomas Adhumeau.

Vice Chair was named as Paula Ortiz, Director of Legal and Institutional Affairs at IAB Spain.

For more information on the DPA outreach working group visit the IAB website.

With only three weeks left until the IAB’s TCF switches to v2.0, the digital advertising industry is putting the finishing touches to their policies to effectively deliver this collective vision.

This second iteration of the framework enables users to opt in or out of advertising targeting under GDPR. With TCF v2.0, consumers can grant or withhold consent and exercise their right to object to their data being processed. It’s a step up from the first framework that allows users more control over their personal data.

The IAB’s TCF v2.0 was officially approved by IAB Europe members in August 2019. Locala has been preparing for it from day one and we’re pleased to say that, thanks to the hard work of our product, legal and partnerships teams, we now fully support this second version of the IAB’s TCF. Locala has been involved from the very start to help deliver this vision, working on its development as part of the IAB Europe’s TCF Steering Group, as well as other working groups such as the Policy and DPA outreach groups.

Fusio, our drive-to-store platform, has supported v2.0 since early April, ahead of the IAB’s August 15 deadline. This means Locala now benefits from users directly opting into geolocation data, ensuring all advertising is user-friendly and transparent without impacting clients.

The IAB’s TCF v2.0 is a real asset for the industry. With enhanced transparency for users and greater control and flexibility for publishers, we’re convinced this new version will bring more choice and transparency to users and we’re already working with the IAB on a potential v3.0.

To learn more about TCF v2.0, visit the IAB Europe’s website.

This article was written by Thomas Adhumeau, General Counsel at Locala.

The IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework 2.0 was rolled out at the end of April. Locala fully committed to the scheme and supported V2 from April 1.

“TCF v2.0 enables consumers to grant or withhold consent and also exercise their ‘right to object’ to data being processed. Consumers also gain more control over whether and how vendors may use certain features of data processing, for example, the use of precise geolocation.” – IAB Europe

Since the announcement of TCF V2 Locala has been involved in its development through the IAB Europe’s TCF Steering Group, as well as other working groups such as the Policy and DPA outreach groups. We are convinced this new version from the IAB will bring more user choice and transparency to users.

Locala has been supporting V2 since April 1 and fine-tuned the way Fusio, our drive-to-store platform, responds to the new signals received. By the end of April we fully supported both V1 and V2, and we will start deprecating V1 when it is no longer in use by our publisher partners (which is currently due to occur by June 30^th). For those using our self-serve platform, there has been no change in campaign set-up or delivery.

We are aware that the Coronavirus may mean it is not possible for our partners to dedicate the necessary resources needed to fully implement V2 to the current deadline, so we are considering extending our deprecation date to ensure everyone is able to complete the work.

For more information on TCF V2.0 visit the IAB Europe website.

Locala announced today a brand-new green initiative to help remove carbon emissions generated by its drive-to-store campaigns. In a long-term partnership with sustainable forestry company EcoTree, Locala will plant new forests to help offset the impact advertising campaigns have on the environment.

From today, every advertising campaign run through Locala’s drive-to-store platform will have its carbon footprint reduced through the planting of trees. At current estimate, direct emissions from campaigns run by Locala equate to around 168 tons of CO2 each year. That means more than 5,000 trees would be planted in 2020 to help offset these emissions, with the number increasing as the business grows.

 “This green initiative goes beyond a one-off purchase of trees, this is a future-facing commitment meaning our business will only offer advertising that is sustainable for our planet” said Locala CEO Christophe Collet.

“Our clients are taking steps to deliver planet-friendly products and services, reducing the impact their activities have on the environment” Collet added. “We want to support brands to reach those goals by delivering advertising that is good for advertisers, good for people and good for the planet”.

“This partnership is born in the particular context of the pandemic, which is a wake up call for us all to build a better world, where our human activities are carried out with the desire to take better care of the environment. EcoTree allows us to work towards our objective of offering sustainable advertising, and to bring our clients along in this great challenge.“ Baudouin Vercken, co-founder of EcoTree

This is an employee-led initiative, started by Locala’s employees, who voted to support green initiatives throughout 2019, and has already begun with the planting of 300 trees in partnership with EcoTree in France.

We’re pleased to announce that, faced with this unprecedented crisis, our French office is rallying around the country’s health professionals and will donate 10% April revenue to the Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris – Hôpitaux de France to help them fight against this pandemic. The foundation aims to improve the quality of life of the children, teenagers and elderly who are in hospital, and plays a key role in the national effort to overcome COVID-19.

For each advertising campaign we’ll be running, we’ll dedicate 10% of its allocated budget to this initiative – without any impact on the volume or the quality of our activations for brands.

This health crisis affects us all, and we all have a role to play to prevent its spread. Never has it been more important to help each other and to stick together. The next few weeks will be decisive, and we’re proud to contribute to the common effort to overcome this pandemic.

We’re proud to have been selected in the French Tech 120, a program dedicated to French start-ups capable of becoming worldwide technology leaders. Our inclusion in the list is a ringing endorsement of our drive-to-store platform and underlines the potential of our business.

The solid foundations we’ve built in the French market and our worldwide  expansion into the rest of Europe, US and Asia, have helped us stand out among the hundreds of companies who applied to be part of 2020’s French Tech 120.

We owe this recognition to our outstanding worldwide team and award-winning drive-to-store technology, which have made Locala the global leader it is today.

Congratulations to all the companies selected for this edition! We can’t wait to see what else 2020 has in store.

We’re delighted to have been awarded the 75th position in Frenchweb’s FW500 – a list of the most dynamic companies in French tech. We’ve been shortlisted four years in a row now and couldn’t be prouder. This ranking showcases an industry in full swing, and being part of it makes us incredibly happy. 

Over the last five years, we’ve spread our wings abroad and opened offices in the US, Canada, the UK, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Singapore. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing and we’ve encountered some local market challenges along the way. But the solid foundations we’ve built in the competitive French market and our team of digital advertising experts have allowed us to build a worldwide award-winning company.

Being ranked in the top 100 companies for three consecutive years is a strong endorsement of our outstanding team and drive-to-store technology, which have made Locala a global leader.

Congrats to all those ranked in this edition! We’re looking forward to what 2020 has to bring.

Nous sommes très heureux d’occuper la 75ème position du classement FW500 de Frenchweb, qui liste les entreprises les plus dynamiques de la French Tech. Nous y figurons pour la quatrième année consécutive et nous en sommes on ne peut plus fiers. Ce classement met en valeur une French Tech qui bat son plein et dont nous sommes ravis de faire partie.

Ces cinq dernières années, nous avons déployé nos ailes à l’étranger et ouvert des bureaux aux Etats-Unis, au Canada, au Royaume-Uni, en Italie, en Espagne, en Belgique et à Singapour. Ça n’a pas toujours été une promenade de santé et nous avons dû faire face à quelques challenges dans les marchés locaux. Mais les bases solides que nous avons construites dans un marché français très concurrentiel et nos équipes d’experts de la publicité digitale nous ont permis de construire une entreprise primée à l’échelle mondiale. 

S’inscrire dans le top 100 de ces entreprises trois années de suite représente une vraie reconnaissance de nos équipes et de notre technologie drive-to-store exceptionnelles, qui ont permis à Locala de devenir un leader mondial. 

Toutes nos félicitations aux lauréats de cette édition ! Nous attendons avec impatience ce que 2020 nous réserve.

At Locala, we firmly believe that marketers need full visibility of the incremental impact of their digital marketing strategy. To help them drive consumers to their stores, we have created the first and only advertising technology that connects brands to consumers by bridging the gap between digital advertising and the real-world.

Fusio by Locala, our proprietary machine-learning technology, gives them the power to maximize their media spend in real-time towards their most valuable business outcomes. This unified technology enables marketers to manage, measure, and optimize incremental visits in real-time to online and physical stores.

Locala is committed to transparency and full autonomy for its clients from online impressions until conversions.

Start measuring your ad spend against your business KPIs today. Discover what we do and join the adventure!

[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/349402879″ align=”center”]

Each year, The Drum Marketing on Mobile (MOMA) Awards puts a spotlight on the industry’s best campaigns from brands and agencies across mobile.

Locala helped Pernod Ricard deliver a mobile campaign across airports in the UK to drive consumers into Duty Free stores with real-time footfall visit measurements. This success campaign has been nominated four times in this year’s MOMA for the following categories:

• Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign/Strategy
• Most Effective Programmatic Buying Mobile Campaign
• Best Use of Location Based Services
• Best Use of Data

This campaign integrated data from Factual to measure visits into shops and delivered overall store visits uplift by 70%. The Best Use of Location Based Services stood out for judges as one of the most competitive categories as the industry finds more sophisticated strategies to apply mobile location data in their campaigns.

Congratulations to all the finalists this and many thanks to Pernod Ricard for this outstanding campaign!

Each year, The Drum Marketing on Mobile (MOMA) Awards puts a spotlight on the industry’s best campaigns from brands and agencies across mobile.

Locala helped Pernod Ricard deliver a mobile campaign across airports in the UK to drive consumers into Duty Free stores with real-time footfall visit measurements. This success campaign has been nominated four times in this year’s MOMA for the following categories:

• Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign/Strategy
• Most Effective Programmatic Buying Mobile Campaign
• Best Use of Location Based Services
• Best Use of Data

This campaign integrated data from Factual to measure visits into shops and delivered overall store visits uplift by 70%. The Best Use of Location Based Services stood out for judges as one of the most competitive categories as the industry finds more sophisticated strategies to apply mobile location data in their campaigns.

Congratulations to all the finalists this and many thanks to Pernod Ricard for this outstanding campaign!

The great debate app vs. browser?
Retailers are on a mission to reach consumers wherever they are. Mobile advertisers are still struggling with the uncertainty of the whether their campaigns should be concentrated on mobile browser or apps. Industry studies found that most online touchpoints happen on mobile-optimized websites and conversion rates on retailer apps are higher than on mobile-optimized web. This means advertisers need to be present everywhere on mobile, a combined and enforced strategy between browser and app inventories. If executed properly, brands can increase purchases and avoid abandoned shopping carts with personalised push notifications and promotions.

Mobile shoppers are going wallet-less
With the introduction of mobile and contactless payment methods to facilitate transactions, brands must adapt their marketing strategies accordingly. Considering the habits of the empowered mobile shopper, advertisers need not fall victim to the showrooming, but rather use this opportunity to drive more traffic into stores. With contactless card expected to double worldwide by 2021, smartphones will become more important than the physical wallet.

Omni-channel shoppers
Practicing both webrooming and showrooming are phenomena that are become the norm when it comes to shopping. This means that people are both shopping online then going into stores to make purchases, as well as checking out merchandise in-store then buying online. What this means for advertisers is that there is an imperative need to have a mobile presence despite the choice of conversion methods.

A global movement toward online
It’s clear: mobile-first shoppers are the future. Around the world, the stats continue to grow consumes become increasingly attached to their mobile devices. Adult consumers in the States are spending an average of 3 hours and 18 minutes on their mobiles this year. Advertisers cannot ignore all signs pointing towards this dominating channel for conversion.What’s more, young people and parents are paving the way to this mobile-first future. 50% of mobile-first Shoppers are between the age of 18–34 and, given that mobile is most parents’ life line, parents make up over 50% of Mobile-first Shoppers.

More than 60% of travelers are using mobile apps while traveling, presenting a tremendous opportunity for travel retail advertisers. Understanding travelers’ behavior is equally important to consider when developing efficient and hyper-personalized digital advertising strategies. Therefore, it is imperative for brands to develop a tailored digital strategy for this space, separate to the way they would target the everyday shopper.

Personalization is a must

Brands should start by focusing on scalable, one-to-one advertising when targeting mobile devices. The device language setting, network carrier and even the make and model of the device can be used to tailor mobile ads and deliver messages that are meaningful, relevant, and that leave a lasting impression to set brands apart from competitors and can achieve a click through rate that is triple that of non-personalized campaigns!

Incentivize brand messages with user-friendly engagements

It’s important to anticipate the needs of travelers when looking at their mobile devices. Given many travelers will be roaming, it’s wise to avoid using heavy creative ad formats. Airports are naturally a high-stress environment, so keeping the creative user-friendly and intuitive, like a coupon to redeem in-store with clear directions to the nearest store, will be more effective and useful for the user.

Get the context right, focus on location and timing

Mobile devices are extremely personal for users, so it’s imperative that brands avoid being intrusive or irrelevant. Geolocation enables brands to use more precise location data when targeting travelers, ensuring campaigns are reaching intended audiences, rather than simply those nearby. Most leisure travelers make plans after having already arrived at their destinations and reach for their mobile devices to research and book activities. Marketers must take into consideration that mobile, therefore, is the only digital channel by which brands can deliver ads with contextual location data.

Measure and track campaign performances & get the most out of your media spend

Travel retail advertisers must insist on real-time visibility into their campaign performances to get the most of ad spend budgets. Advertisers with full control on their campaign data can optimize their ad spending in real-time while the campaign is ongoing. Having post-campaign insights available means brands can re-target and engage with mobile users with sequential messaging or follow-up offers. Furthermore, centralizing all reporting on a unified platform to calculate the return on advertising spend (ROAS) from impression to conversion enables advertisers to know best how to optimize their mobile ad budgets.

Travel retail advertisers can take simple steps, including using mobile device IDs and obtaining campaign metrics in real time and moving to 100% in-app advertising, brands can drive even more traffic from the airport gate into stores and measure the success of their campaigns in real time.

The full article was published by the Moodie Davitt Report, find the complete e-zine here, or download the PDF of the article.

Locala is excited to renew our French Tech Pass again this year and to be a part of this international community. Designed for innovative, fast-growing entrepreneurs and startups, La French Tech aims to encourage international entrepreneurs with bold projects. It targets innovators from all over the world as part of an effort to accelerate the dynamism in the startup ecosystem.

La French Tech advocates pro-business policies while providing access to funding from enthusiastic investors. and exclusive mentorship and networking opportunities. With La French Tech pass, Locala is on a mission to attract the best talent in the tech industry. As the company is scaling up beyond the Hexagon, the French Tech Hubs provide a bridge between major international cities and Locala, facilitating accelerated growth and access abroad. The coming year promises to have a lot of innovative partnerships to come!

About the La French Tech Pass

La French Tech is a community to support French tech startups by facilitating the successful launch of member projects in France. The program is operated by a community of French entrepreneurs and investors with a shared ambition, driven by the French government.

“France’s vision for supporting the emergence of world-wide startups depends on fostering an international perspective: the aim is to encourage the free movement of companies, talent and investment.” Axelle Lemaire and Emmanuel Macron

Locala, a mobile programmatic platform, released a study, “In-App Mobile Advertising Impact” in partnership with IPSOS, a leading research company based in France with representation in 88 countries focused on understanding consumer behaviour. The study evaluates how advertisers should invest in mobile campaigns to attain the best results.

The in-app environment is a context inherently less favourable for advertising. Findings from the study show that both interstitial and MPU formats are efficient and persuasive for the brand. Nearly 500 respondents were surveyed for this study 2 weeks after being exposed to a mobile advertising campaign. The interstitial is a full screen format that leaves a longer lasting brand impression. The MPU is a strict format to deliver but is found to boost brand opinion among exposed consumers.

Here are 4 key findings:

• Mobile in-app formats leave a longer lasting brand impression than desktop formats.

43% of respondents exposed to an interstitial format on their mobiles were able to recall the ad. Only 14% of respondents exposed to desktop banner formats could recall the ad and only 21% for desktop respondents exposed to desktop video formats.

• Impactful brand attribution via mobile ads

96% of respondents that recalled the ad 2 weeks after campaign exposure where able to name the brand in the ad.

• Mobile advertising boosts brand appreciation

Respondents exposed to an interstitial ad rated the brand 26 points higher than unexposed respondents. 49% of respondents exposed to a MPU or interstitial format said that the ad contributed to a positive impression of the brand.

• Mobile campaigns are effective in stimulating purchases

35% of respondents exposed to either MPU or interstitial formats expressed intention to visit the brand’s store or website. These results show that in-app campaigns can meet branding and performance based objectives.

Download Infographic

Read this Infographic on the MobileMarketing News page

Apple announced at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 a suite of news features for iOS 11 that will surely be welcomed by its loyal users. For mobile advertisers, this update doesn’t bring all bad news, there are also some exciting new potentials for marketers with the latest update. For users, it is all good news, as Apple’s new iOS 11 is putting user privacy centre stage.

Cookie era comes to an end

Apple unveiled its new Intelligent Tracking Prevention in the new iOS update, which is essentially an ad tracker blocker for its Safaris web browser, rendering browser cookies ineffective for advertising purposes. Put simply, cross-site tracking via cookies in Safari will no longer be possible. Advertisers and vendors that have large cross-device marketing efforts may need to start looking for alternatives. This is not a move by Apple to kill mobile advertising on iPhone completely. In-app inventory remains unaffected and 90% of user’s time spent are on their mobiles are still within apps. Apple is clearly moving to concentrate advertising efforts within the app environment and reduce monetization opportunities on mobile browsers for publishers. Contrary to Google, where the heart of their business is mostly browser based with AdWords.

As mobile pure-players, we see this as the next logical move after Apple’s introduction of IDFAs. Anonymous IDs only available in app that can be linked to geolocation data in the form of X and Y coordinates or user interests via app usage. IDFAs have longer lifespans than cookies, it expires when the users change their smartphone. For publishers, in an audience planning world where data is king, this is a sure sign to start moving their investments and efforts into app channels on iOS.

More location data control for users

The new location sharing permissions update in iOS 11 will also be daunting for some app developers and vendors who need to collect location data permanently. Prior to this new version, many apps only allowed users to choose between “Always” or “Never” for location sharing with apps. In iOS 11, it will be mandatoryfor developers to display a third option “While in use” to users. Apple goes even further to give users more control on their iPhones.

It is without a doubt, when presented with these options, very few users will accept to share their location data continuously. Realistically, there are very few apps that can justify collecting location data continuously in the background. For example, Snapchat’s latest acquisition, Zenly, is one of the few apps that will require users to allow location in the background in order to operate. A forward thinking move on Snapchat’s part.

Clearly, Apple wants users to be aware of everything that is happening on their device, what is consuming their battery and data, putting app developers in a position to earn trust from users. Users will also see a blue bar of apps that are collecting location data when not in use, forcing apps to be accountable to users.

End of auto-play video

Another new feature that may seem disconcerting for marketers is the possibility to keep auto-play videos paused unless explicitly played by the user. Once again Apple has sided with the users to retain its loyal following, this time making life harder for content publishers. For the moment, this new feature will only be on Safari desktop, but no doubt will soon be on the mobile version of the browser as well.

The silver lining for mobile advertisers

Another iOS 11 update that has somewhat gone under the radar is the new QR code scanner that will be native in the camera app. This new move will make QR codes much more accessible for users on an iOS device. QR codes can facilitate data sharing like contact information, ULRs, and even phone numbers – making it much faster than typing. Now QR codes have the potential to be mainstream without the need for additional software, presenting a true opportunity for advertisers. QR codes are already in fashion in Asia and quickly becoming the preferred payment method for most consumers. Advertisers can leverage this new feature to really bridge their online & offline marketing efforts. Consumers can now scan an OOH advertisement and be redirected into a branded digital universe.

Google’s playbook – will they follow suite?

So it is pretty safe to assume that Google and Android will soon follow with updates of their own that gives users the same amount of control on their devices. In terms of QR code scanner, the Samsung’s Galaxy S8 camera already has an integrated scanner. Up until now, users have to active the Bixby vision feature in the phone’s setting in order to active it – this has been a barrier to adoption as users were not informed about it. The new Android O, releasing after the summer this year, will include background location limits on apps as well to distinguish apps in the foreground and background. Developers will not be able to collect location data as frequent as before. Another bad news for adtech vendors focusing on background location data. Overall, the iOS 11 update is a sign that the industry is maturing in the right direction. Users are demanding more transparency and getting more power and control in return. The mobile advertising industry will have a long future ahead if we don’t lose sight of the user.

Read the article on mmabloguk.com

The duopoly of Google and Facebook accounts for 67% of the mobile ad market in the US, and what’s more…the combined value of GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) is $200Bn more than the CAC40. There are no doubts that these powerful American tech players are exercising their clout to write the rules in the industry.

Transparency is the most important edge against the rise of walled garden platforms in our data-driven business. Here are three principles that advertisers, end users, and ad tech platforms need to agree upon to set transparency as a norm in the mobile advertising ecosystem.

1) Users need to be respected

Let’s not forget that a single click from mobile users can mean converting an ad into a purchase, or blocking out brands forever. Mobile users and their data need to be respected. Advertisers need to draw a clean line between personalised and anonymised data. Both of these data belong to users and they are willing to exchange their anonymised behavioural data in return for free content and services. Conversely, to respect this equilibrium, personal details such as name, age, gender, telephone number, personal photos, emails, social media activities should be off limits. This is not the case for platforms based on logged environments today. It is entirely possible to send desirable mobile advertising that provides added-value for the end user just based on anonymous data from each device’s unique ID. Like cookies, users can reset this ID, however this is not the case for their login usernames and passwords.

2) Advertisers, own your campaign data

In the same logic, advertisers are fully entitled to their campaign data. These datasets are the key to understanding how your target consumers are engaging with your efforts. These insights empower advertisers with ways to better optimise and reach highly sought-after audiences. At Locala, our advertisers can retrieve their campaign data in real-time with visibility into each user’s behaviours (clicks, views, post-click engagements etc). This should be an industry norm because without this ownership, advertisers will not have independence and risk losing a lot more than that. Think about all the insights that arise from post-campaign data and its potential for future marketing strategies. With Google or Facebook, they retain the ownership of these valuable post-campaign data.

Can you trust these walled gardens to not leverage your campaign insights to advance their own agendas or share it with your competitors?

3) Time to level the playing field

Our battle is to ensure the advertisers are getting what they paid for and users receive desirable ads with added-value. Without trust, this is not possible. Trust is founded on mutual agreements, like standards, that helps to level the playing field between GAFA and the rest. One industry example is the need for technologies to be validated by third-party accreditation organisations, like the MRC. Our technology is dedicated to upholding standardised counting methods and the MRC accreditation to avoid measurement discrepancies ir order to deliver the highest standards in the market for advertisers. Next, interoperability and an cooperative attitude to key to better serve our clients. This is why the Locala technology is open and compatible with industry measurement players such a Integral Ad Science, Nielsen DAR, ComScore and many others. This kind of transparency will make our data-driven business more efficient for everyone.

I think we have heard mobile users loud and clear last year when mobile adblockers were introduced, now it’s up to advertisers to make sure they are heard. At the end of the day, it is up to them to choose a technology that is open and transparent. Advertisers should choose how their campaigns are charged and evaluate their investments based on certified KPIs. We need you: advertisers, and we’re here to protect you!

Let’s not forget that transparent alternatives is the key to guaranteeing added-value for all stakeholders. That’s why we continue to stand for independence in the best interest for our clients, mobile users, and the future of our industry.

Agree with what you read? Share this article and learn more about a breakthrough mobile buying model that we’ve invented – the CPLP!

This article was originally published by Christophe Collet on LinkedIn Pulse.

It is no secret by now that mobile programmatic is indispensable in the advertiser’s media plan today. When accomplished correctly, brands can reach their intended customer in the most receptive moment to convert an intention into a transaction.

Despite the increasing prominence of mobile programmatic, some brands are still on the fence and not yet buying into the promise; especially as the industry continues to be haunted by ad fraud issues. The keys to resolving this continuous dilemma are advertiser confidence and user acceptance, so the industry can finally deliver what it has set out to do and more.

To put the challenge at scale, this year alone, mobile ad spending is set to exceed $100 Billion USD worldwide, taking 54.9% of the global digital ad spending budget. As investments accelerate, the mobile digital industry needs a consensus on how to qualify the ROIs and ensure these budgets align with business objectives and deliver true lifetime value for the end-users. Brands may be able to accept a lean return but it will be much harder to recover from user rejection on their most frequented mobile devices. The onus is on marketers to seek and insist on true engagement metrics within their mobile campaigns and to put the users first.

Measuring mobile campaign impact needs to consider two different smartphone environments, mobile browsers and mobile apps, which require unifying metrics. Within both environments, we are already measuring impression views and clicks but that is not enough, we must have visibility on user actions post-ad. Mobile campaign metrics have to qualify true user engagements for the industry to improve and innovate continuously!

First, an ad impression must only be considered seen by the user when it has fully rendered on the smartphone screen. When counting clicks as engagement metrics, we need assurances that these clicks are net of human traffic and not accidental. Filtration techniques exist today to address the issue of fraud traffic as specified by industry bodies such as the MRC/IAB, where only one click can be attributed to one impression. As marketers, counting impression views and clicks are important to ensure users are not irritated on their smartphones with partly loaded impressions and videos that do not play.

However, as a marketer, you don’t want the users to just see your ad but also engage with the message. At this point, the success indicator must be a fully loaded landing page within the browser to know without a doubt that the message has been received by the user. To achieve even more peace of mind, brands can also measure mobile app opens and active installs to evaluate user acquisitions effectiveness. Being able to follow the user actions post-ad reassures brands that they have engaged with their audience and not just delivered unsolicited ads.

As an industry, mobile programmatic advertising needs to prioritise advertiser confidence and user acceptance. Brands, publishers, technology providers, and users alike, will benefit from true indicators for high-quality mobile engagements. This is also the only way to guarantee sustainable added-value for everyone. In practice, brands have to insist on qualifying engagements with certified metrics such as rendered impressions, clicks net of fraud, fully loaded landing pages, active installs and app opens. By eliminating unreliable measurement and putting the user first, we can finally elevate the industry’s quality standards, bring advertisers peace of mind and deliver the best experience for users.

This article was also published on the IAB UK Blog.

When we talk about creativity in advertising, we’re usually referring to the actual ad creative itself — the genius ideas that become the genesis of sticky and memorable advertisements, like the 1985 Levi’s launderette ad or the Cadbury gorilla.

Enter the digital world; times have changed. Television and print aren’t the only mediums by which advertisers can reach mass consumer audiences anymore.

As mobile devices become more ubiquitous, mobile screens are where the majority of consumers’ eyeballs are. While artistry and storylines are important in engaging audiences, equally, the context in which those ads are delivered is today equally as important to engagement as the uniqueness of the ad storyline and copy itself.

Context is the new creativity

At Locala, we hold the belief that ‘context is the new creativity.’ Allow me to explain how and why.

In the past, advertisers operated on the presumption that the creativity buck stopped with the art director. All the other elements of placing an ad, like strategic media buys, were seen as simply business-related function; wholly independent of the creative process altogether.

“It’s about having the right insight and using it well”

However, these days, thinking creatively extends to the business side of advertising as well. Advertisers need to start thinking more creativity, and not just when it comes to hiring the best, most creative thinking copywriters and art directors.

They also need to think about delivery of the ad itself more creatively, because these days, the manner in which the creative is delivered for the mobile user is just as important as the creative itself.

It’s one thing to develop the sticky, funny and engaging videos, banners and static ads for mobile, but that’s just half of the challenge. The other half of the challenge lies in delivering well-developed advertising to the right people, at the right time, in the right manner, to ensure that advertising resonates and brings about a return on investment.

By improving the creative delivered via mobile and personalising advertising experiences based on the time, place and location of mobile users, we can go beyond reaching the intended audiences but also better engage with them. It’s about having the right insight and using it well.

Brands doing it well

Innovative brands like L’Oreal are already proving the importance of using context to better deliver mobile creative campaigns. When L’Oréal Luxe Travel Retail Americas wanted to target Brazilian tourists traveling to Miami, Locala helped them to reach and engage mobile users across continents for a ‘brandformance’ campaign.

The campaign followed travellers from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro airports to Miami and back to raise awareness for the Polo Red Fragrance by Ralph Lauren and encouraged purchase near duty-free points of sale. During the campaign, more than 70% of users engaged more than 12 seconds compared to an industry average of five seconds on the landing page.

Also, 69% of users during the campaign accepted geolocation to locate the nearest Duty-Free store.

Accreditation and insight

Accreditation can go a long way towards effecting a creative use of context. For example, accreditation by an industry body such as the Media Ratings Council (MRC) helps advertisers better engage with audiences.

This is because when a company has certification on insight such as mobile post-click ad metrics, it allows for better insight into how consumers engage with an ad and what they want from an advertising experience, meaning that marketers can be more targeted.

Validation from a third party organisation like MRC assures brands that their ad creative is leveraged in the most efficient ways possible.

It may seem that the platforms, challenges, and insights presented by our increasingly digital, mobile-centric world have made the job of advertising to consumers more difficult and multi-layered. It’s certainly a far cry from the two-dimensional world of print and TV advertising of yesteryear, but it doesn’t have to seem overly complex.

With the right advertising solutions, cutting through to consumers can become a more interesting, insight-led process that is, in effect, as creative as it is business-savvy.

This article was also published in Marketing Tech News.

Advertisers are no stranger to the necessity of delivering receptive personalized messaging on mobile. Today, this is possible through leveraging unique user behavioral and location data from mobile devices and the widely adopted use of dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technology. Here are 5 tips to leverage DCO in mobile campaigns to engage with mobile users and exceed campaign objectives:

1. Personalized advertising – remember the human connection

Increasingly sophisticated algorithms have helped to facilitate a lot of the campaign processes today, but don’t forget that at the end of the day, you need a person behind the personalized advertising! The human decisions that determine the DCO strategy cannot be overlooked. Avoid the common pitfall of expecting the algorithms to do all the work, we can trust DCO technology to determine and deliver personalized creative at scale, but the strategic planning and monitoring is still decided by humans. For example, marketers have to decide how to segment the audience to optimize the key message, either by geography or demographics. Then follow-through with a personalized message from the ad to the landing page in the click-through link via dynamic URL parameters and deep-linking apps to urge your prospects closer to conversion.

2. Be selective – don’t test everything at once!

Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) is a continuous process. Marketers must resist the urge to optimize everything at the same time. When too many elements are varied, it makes it very difficult to establish a baseline and pinpoint actionable insights. It pays to be selective when choosing the creative elements to make dynamic, and align it with your campaign objectives. When applying DCO, it’s important to follow your audience with reliable conversion tags and detecting the various user interaction rates along the campaign. With these insights, marketers can then determine the frequency rules of their ads and reserve higher frequencies at the top of their consumer conversion funnel.

3.  Keep an eye on your campaign – monitor early and regularly

After determining the campaign objectives (branding, website visits, app installs, etc) advertisers should start monitoring their campaigns early on – don’t wait until the campaign is halfway over to start analyzing the results! This way you will be able to adjust your goals if they have already been met and set new objectives and aim for changes and improvements during the campaign.

4. DCO is not A/B testing

Experienced marketers are all familiar with A/B testing, but it shouldn’t be grouped into the same category with DCO. The underlying assumption with A/B testing is that one concept is better than the other and once that’s determined, it will be delivered at scale. The beauty of DCO is that when applied properly, advertisers can determine the best concept for each target audience, and it doesn’t end there! With DCO, advertisers can keep up with the changing preferences of their target audience, and be sure to deliver different but receptive brand messages to their customers. This way, advertisers can quickly vary creative elements in a meaningful way and use the optimization engine to rotate out ineffective creatives.

5. Take retargeting to a new level!

Last but not least, marketers should aim to tell a continuous brand story by retargeting the users based on their past individual interactions with the ad and applying contextual data uniquely from mobile devices. With DCO you can deliver targeted sequential messaging. For example, use multilayer sequential messaging after a user has seen a short video. For the next exposure, deliver a longer video along the same subject to be more effective and continue where you left off. Unlike desktop campaigns, when retargeting for mobile, leverage geo-location data to increase the relevancy and engagement rate so your brand message really speaks directly to the user. Some creative uses of geolocation data can go beyond just locating the nearest point of purchase, but delivering messages with geographic context based on elements like weather warnings, important landmarks, local sports team news and travel options.

This post was also published by the Mobile Advertising Watch

Consumers are bombarded by millions of different messages everyday in this new digital era, where home, work, and relationships are blurred distinctions. To manage their daily lives, the consumer has firmly taken control by becoming the decision makers for what they see, read, download, and more importantly what they want to block.

In the fast-paced mobile world, brands can’t afford to miss customer preferences, otherwise they will be quickly alienated by their target customers. As a result, brand marketers need to change the way they communicate with these new digital-savvy consumers by correctly employing mobile programmatic to accelerate a brand’s affinity with their consumers.

In short, mobile premium programmatic delivers the most relevant content, in the best format at the right moment in the perfect context to the most appropriate audience. By grasping the full potential of premium programmatic with four key principles, brands will earn consumer loyalty to engage in a lasting affair.

1. Respect your lover

Now that consumers have the power to block ads, the best solution is to engage in a one-to-one conversation and stand out using native advertising. Native mobile advertising is experiencing explosive growth, worth more than $50B USD worldwide (eMarketer). Brands not only need to seek acceptance from their customers but also capture their attention. Native mobile advertising delivers ad formats that respect the end-user and does not distract their experiences. More importantly, it enriches and educates consumers to take more informed decisions and cultivate mutual respect.

2. Find the one

Consumers are increasingly spending more time on mobile devices with changing behavioural patterns, and do not expect to be interrupted by non-contextual ads disrupting their activity. Data analytics is absolutely essential to provide this context. Mobile programmatic can reach almost any intended audience worldwide through premium publisher partnerships or engage a hyper-local audience niche. For example, first and third party data, location history, premium app usage behaviour, device OS, languages, time of day, and weather data, all help to provide context behind content. It’s time to give the right context to ads and deliver a unique and tailored experience for each individual.

3. Learn to trust

For users, it is irritating when an advertisement interrupts their mobile activity and takes them out of their activity into the browser or the app store. Adding to this frustration, the users then find themselves in front of a page or a video that does not display properly and is impossible to exit. Viewability and targeting issues are a continuous struggle for marketers but end-user experiences should not have to suffer as well. Within the mobile market today, there are no industry standards of yet, but regardless, premium programmatic is already able to guarantee 100 per cent viewability and targeting to prevent poor user experiences. This new level of authenticity can only serve to enhance trust between a brand and their customers and will transform the entire advertising industry.

4. Money matters

Engagement is the new mobile currency, set KPIs by applying data-driven decisions and evaluations. Knowing exactly when and how the customers will engage with your message and when they reject advertisements is key to building a sustainable and long-term two-way conversation. Brands need to evaluate a campaign performance based on conversions and evaluate branding campaigns based on the degree of user engagements. Also, brands should seek insights on what exactly takes place throughout the consumer experience in the conversion funnel, which can last from anything between 5 seconds to 15 minutes. Mobile programmatic marketers should measure and only pay for real impressions, real engagements, real-clicks, real-arrivals, and conversions.

Seal the deal

Communicating with customers in the most engaging and relevant ways will help brands create and nurture sustainable and positive relationships. Ultimately, loyal customers are a brand’s best ambassadors that generate lifetime value and trust. By applying these four key principles, mobile advertising can finally come of age and be a sustainable business. Monetising mobile through premium programmatic needs to be adopted more widely as it is the only way to let your consumers experience brand love.

This article was also published in The Drum