Brands offered deep insight on Underground users

undergroundExterion Media, the company which runs all London Underground advertising, is launching a new insight tool which will tap into data on 25 million O2 customers, to generate actionable demographic and behavioural detail about Tube users.
Dubbed Abi – which is short for Audience Behavioural Insight – the tool draws on anonymous aggregated data, and is the first product borne from the partnership between Exterion and O2 owner Telefónica UK.
It claims to offer brands and advertisers the ability to better understand and target consumers.
Exterion head of data and technology Mick Ridley said: “The power of actionable data is now available to brands like never before. Understanding the actual, persistent – and not claimed – behaviours of groups of consumers over time with a tool like Abi allows for more effective decision-making.
“The level of insight to be gained from analysing behavioural data just does not exist in the highly modelled, static data that has up until now been applied to dynamic environments like the London Underground. We’re in a very transformative, but hugely exciting time in out-of-home.”
Ridley claimed that in addition to helping marketers to better use digital screens to target audiences with relevant and well-timed messages, the tool will also help planners to understand how to deliver to audiences in outer zone stations in a smart, context-relevant way.
Abi identifies the millions of journeys made on the Underground every day and overlays on these journeys location and behavioural data from the O2 customer base. The dashboard allows brands to plan campaigns around the crowd behaviours of aggregated groups from three core sources: mobile activity from devices within the network; anonymised CRM data from the O2 network, and behaviour collected via app usage and web browsing
The tool protects customers’ information and data by anonymising and aggregating all information – users only ever see crowds, and never the identification of an individual.
“It was important to us to create a flexible solution that allowed for the manipulation of data to not only deliver on clients’ needs, but demonstrate our effectiveness against other media channels,” Ridley added. “Diving into the tool, users can quickly see that it goes far beyond simple audience targeting and delivers real insights about behaviours and sites.”

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