How Outdoor Advertising is Becoming Increasingly Connected to Your Mobile Phone
Vodafone Group has recently signed a deal with outdoor advertising behemoth JCDecaux that will allow the mobile phone carrier to install small cell technology on billboards and street furniture, in order to increase coverage for its customers.
According to a December 11 MobileWorldLive article, the collaboration is just one part of Vodafone’s Project Spring, a £19 billion investment plan intended to boost the British phone company’s network reach, data connectivity speeds and voice quality.
By deploying small cells onto JCDecaux’s billboards and bus stops throughout urban population centers, Vodafone, the third-largest mobile provider in the world, intends to give its customers improved 3G and 4G connections and better indoor and outdoor phone coverage. Vodafone will have access to install these small cells on more than 100,000 JCDecaux properties throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia.
With this partnership, JCDecaux is joining a number of other outdoor advertising companies that have moved toward mobile integration and interactivity with technologies like near-field communication, scannable QR codes and more, according to a Media Daily News article.
Currently, the Vodafone-JCDecaux partnership has no advertising component, Media Daily News reports. However, these small cells could help marketers coordinate their mobile web campaigns with their outdoor marketing campaigns, as they would allow information about consumers’ locations to be tracked more accurately than ever.
Such a move wouldn’t be unprecedented. Last year, Posterscope, an outdoor communications and advertising firm, inked a deal with British mobile network company EE (Everything Everywhere) to access its mobile usage data and customers’ location-based behaviors, according to Media Daily News.
As mobile phone technologies become increasingly integrated with outdoor advertising, it’s clear that the advertisements consumers see every day will become ever more targeted to their locations.
