Join us Sept. 14-16 in Miami to connect with top publishing leaders
Jameson Irish whiskey, part of France’s Pernod Ricard, is targeting an unlikely demo with its latest U.K. outdoor ad campaign: beer-swilling lads.
“The core challenge has been recruiting men within the age group 25-30 into the brand,” said Vicky Hoey, head of marketing at the brand. “We’re looking for ‘lads,’ really: those laid-back, urban, social males.”
Lads may not fit the typical demographic for a whiskey brand. Using outdoor advertising company Posterscope and Havas Media, Jameson launched a data-driven campaign to select the sites to most effectively reach young men. Outdoor advertising is increasingly using mobile and social data to understand what people think, feel and do, and targeting them accordingly.
“We needed a smart data strategy to reach this ‘lad’ audience,” said Ryan Hedditch, business director at Posterscope.
According to research from outdoor-planning agency Kinetic Worldwide, outdoor advertising makes £1 billion a year. Twenty-two percent of these sales are on digital out of home (DOOH), a figure set to rise to 35 percent in the next five years. Brands like Jameson contribute to this by planning campaigns by the audience rather than the format.
In the case of Jameson, the whiskey brand used an audience-discovery engine called Locomizer. The platform’s algorithm analyzed Twitter data that was geographically close to the 4,500 bars or pubs that sell Jameson whiskey. It zeroed in on males fitting the lad demo on Fridays and Saturdays to see where drinkers went before or after a night of drinking. Affinity scores were calculated for each DOOH site based on the data and the proximity to a whiskey-selling venue. Posterscope and Havas could use that data to place ads on nearby digital outdoor sites to prime the target audience before a night on the town.
One surprise that the data showed was that sites around the University of Oxford had particularly high affinity scores for certain venues, despite not being geographically close to them, which bucked the trend for other sites near universities in the country. Jameson’s messages were then tailored for students, appearing earlier in the week coinciding with more student drinking nights.
Jameson is used to running campaigns that last just a few weeks, but this campaign, at seven months, is the longest it has ever run. That, along with the use of data, makes sense, as reaching a new audience may take longer. Time will tell if targeting lads pays off for Jameson.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
More in Marketing
Future of Marketing Briefing: The public ad tech era is over
Gone are the days when investors got themselves in a tizzy over ad networks, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms on their own merits.
By the numbers: Wall Street’s tough assessment of ad tech
Big Tech continues to dominate digital growth, triggering a Wall Street exodus, but are returns imminent?
CMOs are struggling to link AI visibility with sales
Brands are spending on tools that rate their visibility within LLM responses and AI search, but proving the commercial impact of GEO remedies isn’t easy.