Firefly Pioneers Mobility-Based Audience Planning

Advertising is no longer linear or predictable, consumers call the shots and long gone are the days for when they have to wait for a particular time to see a show, or a certain day of the week to read a magazine, and most of their world (and content) is attached to their mobile phones and can be accessed whenever they want.  

So in today’s modern age, it’s no longer about consumers finding you in exchange for some content they’re looking for, the on-demand world has changed that dynamic entirely.  The pendulum has now swung to the other side, and brands have to literally go to where their target audiences are.  Whether it be navigating the fragmented new age Television space with OTT & CTV, or trying to stand out amongst the clutter in the digital world, or fighting for a voice within the walled gardens, or perhaps putting up a giant stationary billboard where they frequent, brands are coming up with new and innovative tactics to reach and engage with their audiences.

How better to reach audiences than to understand how they move about in the physical world.  That’s exactly what we have done at Firefly.  With mobility at the core of who we are as a company, we’ve designed an audience planning tool in partnership with Neustar, that analyzes how consumers move about in the world.  

There are numerous audience-based planning tools in the industry, what makes this one so unique?  First and foremost, most audience tools in the industry are anchored in census or HH data, meaning the consumer data that’s being processed is being taken from where someone resides or sleeps during the night, and that is where the insights populate from - essentially someone’s home address.  Firefly’s audience data is derived from how consumers physically move in the world and carry out their day to day lives.

With help from Neustars’ E1 Taxonomy, brands can create their own audience segments using the 13,000 inputs and 172 audience segments, or even utilize their own first-party data.  With this data we’ve been able to create a tool that breaks down consumer movement behavior into various dayparts, and are even able to parse out Weekday vs Weekend behaviors.  These behaviors are then indexed by select hextile & zip codes and overlayed into the 15+ regions within the US that Firefly has a footprint within.

Today marks the introduction of our mobility-based audience planning tool - the first of its kind in not only the DOOH space, but in all of Ad-Tech.  This tool ultimately helps enable Brands the ability to better understand how to reach audiences when they’re in the proper mindset and ultimately amplify brand messaging with little to no media waste.