How to target affluent air travellers with mobile ads

For jewellery retailer Tanishq, knowing where and when to reach the affluent set is vital. For example, if they knew that an affluent person in India mostly takes evening flights, and spends more than an hour and a half on his or her smartphone while waiting at an airport, that would be a golden opportunity for targeting their mobile ads about a new diamond collection. Furthermore, details like the traction being the highest at the Mumbai and Kolkata airports between 7pm and 12amwould enable additional refinement in the mobile ad strategy.

Enter AdNear, a big data company in the mobile ad tech space, whose business it is to process billions of ads and terabytes of consumer location and response data every month.

AdNear collects vast amounts of granular geographical data from multiple sources, as well as huge masses of mobile user behavioral data, connects the dots with intelligent programming and mines out key insights useful for retailers ranging from grocers to auto companies. They have just released a comprehensive study on air traveller behaviour in India.

Air travellers are a key target for a wide array of marketers. Behavioral insights into how this segment interacts and responds can be a gold mine for companies. The information allows marketers to plan their campaigns for maximum impact and sales conversion. This is just as vital for a jewellery chain like Tanishq as it is for a QSR (quick service restaurant) chain like Subway. The QSR would love to know, for instance, that Thursday happens to be the most preferred day of travel for homemakers and students, and 3pm to 7pm is when airports have the highest percentage of that segment.

Anil Mathews, Founder & CEO of AdNear, explains the significance of such insights: “Audience data is very powerful as brands get to know their target audience. Mobile has emerged as an extremely personal, engaging and measurable medium to reach out to this audience, anytime, anywhere. This is very empowering for brands; it helps them to drive superior engagement amongst their customers."For the air traveller study, using its audience location technology to analyse user behavior, AdNear tracked 650,000 travellers -- all mobile users, of course -- across six airports in India: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad. The data they mined over three months threw up a number of interesting insights.

They found that mobile users in Mumbai were more active on their devices compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Compared to the average time spent on mobile of 1.61 hours per user, Mumbai travellers were 14 per cent more engaged, followed by Kolkata travellers at 8 per cent. Surprisingly for a tech city, Bangalore travellers came up least engaged at 18 per cent less than the average. The reasons for the variance could be anything from attitude to tech savvy to wifi connectivity.

Professionals were found to spend the most time on their phones at airports, at an average of 2.2 hours, followed by homemakers at an average of two hours.Thursday was not only the most preferred day of travel for homemakers and students, but also saw the highest mobile engagement across all audience segments.

Anil Mathews says that the unique ability to leverage audience location insights can play an important role in ensuring marketing campaigns deliver high return on investment. “Businesses can tap into AdNear’s technology and trove of data to identify where to target specific audiences and when it is the best time to reach out."

A key transformation brought about by the digital age is a shift in the balance of power and control to the hands of buyers. Behavioral insights that would help marketers catch up with the radical changes in buying behavior and anticipate how consumers behave are therefore becoming more vital by the day.

Here are the detailed findings of the air traveller study conducted by AdNear:

You can download the complete report here.

About AdNear

Headquartered in Singapore, AdNear is backed by Canaan Partners and Sequoia Capital. The company currently profiles users in Southeast Asia, Australia and India, and has the largest location-based audience in the Asia-Pacific region. Many global brands such as Google, Audi, P&G, McDonalds, and others are already employing AdNear’s technology to target specific audience segments relevant to their businesses.

For a closer look into how this big data company uses location data to drive superior targeting of ads across mobile devices, read 100+ million profiled users in 2 years. 2.1 billion location footprints in 4000 cities. The AdNear story

What are the ways in which brands can use these behavioral insights? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.