Changing the Game in Outdoor Advertising With Cortex

Billboard advertising is known as a mass marketing medium for brands up to now.

We are here to challenge this common wisdom using Cortex and transforming billboard advertising.

In this blogpost; we will show you how Cortex can be utilized to shift the current paradigm of outdoor advertising with its state-of-the-art technology.

Outdoor advertising has been pretty much the same old, same old

Digital billboards, despite advancements, face an intrinsic problem: they cannot curate customer actions like online ads do. While hardware-enhanced billboards can offer more targeted reach and detailed reporting with camera technologies (e.g., assessing crowd density or engagement), they still struggle in converting views into actions such as clicking a link or purchasing. This is because:

1. Being Restricted With Only Anonymous Viewers: Identifying viewers is a challenge due to the transient nature of outdoor audiences and privacy law constraints, making it hard to target directly with individuals.
2. Ad Exposure Duration: Due to short duration of ads on rotating digital billboards, typically 10-15 seconds. After seeing the ad, it is hard for consumers to act, and interact in such a short duration. Also; the go-to solution to target individuals like scanning QR-codes cannot provide a practical solution. People very rarely pick up their phones, fire up their camera, zoom in and target the QR-code, and then click the link the QR-code generated.

That’s why, creating targeted outreach using billboards have never been very fruitful and cost-effective marketing solution.

Innovation that Comes with Real-Time Push-Notifications Based on Geolocation

Selfuel plans to shift the current paradigm and revolutionize billboard advertising as we all know it.
Using Cortex, we leverage real-time data from billboards along with data coming from the brand application. In this case, Cortex acts as the automated data processing backbone enabling this feat. Cortex Applications are created and deployed within seconds with the desired architecture.

The architecture is set to send personalized push notifications in seconds after ad exposure. The main details of the outdoor advertising architecture can be summarized as follows:

1. Audience Identification and Engagement:
   1. Cortex uses consented application location data fed by brand appllication to match users and people in the pre-set geofence of digital billboards during ad displays.
   2. For the matched users, push notification is immediately triggered to take show up on their phones.
2. Contextual and Dynamic Interaction: Notification content can be tailored considering contextual factors like, time of day, weather, ad versions (in case of multiple ad versions), customer behavior (if provided by brand).
3. Data Feed for Detailed Reporting: After the ad-exposure; Cortex processes and feeds data to curated tables as records for advertising company and/or for the brand for campaign effectiveness and customer behavior analyses.

Cortex Features Enabling Innovation

Feature	Benefits
Real-time Data Processing	Minimum latency with millisecond-level event data processing
Multiple data sources & formats	Ability to integrate data from various sources and in formats for broader analyses
Drag-drop Interface	Easy & fast data solution development minimizing technical expertise need
Rapid Setup & Deployment	Instant deployment & activation ensuring prompt campaign launch
Automated Reporting	Automatically handles data collection for post-op analyses
Zero Maintenance	Allows on-the-run adjustments in data solution without any maintenance issues
Scalability	Handles varying data volumes, ideal for campaigns using large data

Benefits

This solution brings significant benefits for brands engaging in digital outdoor advertising.

• Enhanced and Targeted Customer Engagement: Converts passive viewers to active participants with immediate, personalized push notifications.
• Cost Efficiency and ROI: Enables measurable returns on ad investment on outdoor advertising.
• Continuous and Real-time Insights: Enables detailed post-ad engagement data for campaign optimization and possible adjustments.
• Infinite Possibilities for Targeted/Mass Ad Curation: Your data can be processed, modified and enriched using drag and drop with no technical expertise. The only limit is your imagination.

Conclusion

Our innovative approach addresses the core challenges of digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising, enabling more engaging, impactful, and measurable advertising strategies. It goes beyond just being a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic asset for brands to really connect with audiences.

Selfuel is a technology and innovation enabler. With Cortex, Selfuel provides organizations a real-time data processing engine to develop customizable and scalable data solutions for all data related business challenges, without coding and maintenance effort, using their drag-and-drop interface.

Interested in taking your outdoor advertising to the next level? Book a free discovery call with our team.