Why ‘The Donut Problem’ Demands Brands Take a Localized Approach

4 Min Read

What is ‘The Donut Problem’, and what can brands do about it? Carat, the global marketing and advertising network, recently released their 2021 trends report, where multiple sources show that the ‘Fifteen-Minute City’ is well and truly alive. This urban planning model, requires minimal travel and provides “everything a resident [would] need within a quarter of an hour by foot of bike…offices, restaurants, parks, hospitals and cultural venues.” If we tie this back to the donut analogy, this means that we’re seeing more activity in the outskirts and residential areas, with a big hole in the middle (central hubs or cities). The pandemic has only accelerated this shift, since people have mostly been holed up at home.

Daily habits used to look a little something like this: wake up in the morning, breakfast while you scroll through the news events on your phone or television, office commute in your car or mass transport while you listen to a podcast/radio or a couple of billboards catch your eye, a day in the office, followed by a commute back home after work. Media consumption has since been brought indoors in a remote work environment, rendering our personal devices at home our main source of media consumption.

This shift has given independent and local businesses and economies the boost they desperately need, especially in light of the “shop local” movement. E-commerce website builder Shopify saw a 53% increase in new online store creators in April 2020 versus the previous month. In fact, the last half of 2020 has seen shopping malls become ghost towns and e-commerce reach new heights – studies suggest that it will double in size by 2022. 

If we’re staying local and shopping local, what does this mean for brands?

Hyperlocalization is key to drive foot (and online) traffic to physical locations and nearby searches – for example, if you’re looking for a book and it’s sold at your nearby bookstore, you would do a search for another one open closeby. One way of reaching these audiences is through Connected TV, which enables brands to target with pinpoint precision according to user interests and demographics – including geotargeted advertising, on a state, city and even zip code level.

This hyperlocal targeting, when paired with other criteria, makes Connected TV an effective tool. Much like digital ad channels, advertisers can leverage third-party audience data to target not only based on location, but on other data points as well. For example, MNTN has partnered with leading data provider, Oracle Data Cloud, to enable access to over 30,000+ audience segments within our CTV ad solution. This gives advertisers the freedom to select any mix of targeting criteria, meaning their ads will be served only to pre-selected viewers in the locations they want to target. In addition to this, these ads will be paired only with the right television networks, to give ads maximum exposure to their relevant audience.

How Connected TV advertising reaches audience in a hyperlocal world

“The Donut Problem” is a shift in consumer habits driven by COVID-19, and at the same time streaming TV has fast tracked in popularity. CTV ads are a convergence of these two shifts in consumer habits, and is an example of what brands should be looking for when trying to reach audiences in this new, hyperlocalized world. Firstly, it respects the omni-channel touchpoints that a user makes on their journey. This consequently demands an omni-channel approach to digital advertising. Usually, advertisers would need to turn to several solutions and platforms to meet this need, whereas you can achieve all of this through MNTN. Since omni-channel advertising is fully automated on our platform, advertisers can reach users in the form of related ads on their other devices, once a Connected TV ad has been viewed – all driven from one platform. 

Secondly, advertisers have the ability to drill down even further beyond hyperlocal targeting, and tap into in-market, demographics, interests and more. Since Connected TV can be used as a direct-response channel, advertisers can customize their reporting view according to their needs, whether that be on a geographical or even order/conversions level. We also recommend brands use a secondary ‘source of truth’ to measure performance in addition to in-platform reporting capabilities. MNTN has integrated Google Analytics into our analytics structure. This tracks performance data from your CTV advertising campaigns alongside your other other digital marketing channels.

Ready to learn more? We’ll be hosting a free webinar with MediaPost this Thursday January 28th. Learn more about Connected TV as a full-funnel solution, and even pick up a few campaign tips to prepare you for all of the shopping and holidays seasons this year.