Broadcasting, Narrowcasting, Finecasting and Marketing

OVER THE PAST 30 years or so we have seen a series of major developments in how audiences interact with and consume media.
And with each incremental shift, the repercussions for marketing and advertising are significant. Back in the 1990’s each city across the world had only handful of TV stations, newspapers and radio stations.

The audiences these mediums captivated were truly massive – in the more populace cities in the world we are talking millions of potential viewers, readers and listeners at any given time.

And for advertisers to get their messages across, they had to pay accordingly based on total potential audiences, rather than actual potential customers.

The marketing waste in these old marketing models was also truly massive.

To reach a few hundred or even a few thousand people who actually (a) had any interest whatsoever in the product being advertised and (b) were actually looking to purchase the said product tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people were also exposed who were simply not going to purchase now - or ever.

The dawn of the internet and audience fragmentation changed this.

With the rise of cable and pay TV models across the world audiences fragmented into special interest groups such as sports, home improvement, lifestyle or news programming enabling advertisers to reach a better defined demographic. Known as ‘narrowcasting’ or ‘target marketing’ this approach minimises waste, and improves cost efficiency in marketing messages.

In the online world, user data could easily be collected from behaviour and actions. The genres of web-content consumed. How long spent on different types of websites. How often a user returns - if at all - to a particular site.

Even personal data such as age, sex, ethnicity, location, affluence can be intuitively deduced from what, how and where and when a person accesses content online.

This type of data collection enables a highly detailed profile of individual users to be built over time.

When advertising on such a personal level to a small group - or even a single person - it is known as ‘finecasting’.

The next step in this evolution is enabled by the technological development and ubiquity of the smartphone.

Being a deeply personal device the information a smartphone can yield about its user makes it arguably the most valuable source of data potential for advertisers in the modern age.

In addition to the same data sets presented by capturing online behaviour, the smartphone can also give insight into how people move across space and interact with the immediate physical environment.

For example, through GPS smartphone data can show how far a person travels in a day, where they stop and for how long across vast distances.

A smartphone can also be used to see how a person navigates smaller, more intimate spaces such as retail shopfronts.

This is where Foresense Technologies come into the fray.

Our revolutionary platform takes finecasting to the next level both in data collection and as a highly targeted advertising solution.

Foresense Technologies is an industry leader in the collection of visitor presence data and the analysis of how people act – and interact – on-site in real world settings to provide real-time analytics of foot traffic inside and around any physical location.

In a similar way to how behavioural data is utilised online through careful analysis of aspects such as dwell time, session duration, and unique and return visitations the Foresense platform collects data through sensors integrating with visitors’ smartphones.

The platform makes intelligent of use of this customer data for tailored advertising messages on-screen or via instore digital signage and can even initiate push notification and digital remarketing technologies to ensure that each sale has the best possibility of going through to completion.

With Foresense Technology, finecast marketing takes new directions which present exciting new possibilities that allow a deeply personal retail experience to reduce marketing waste, improve the bottom line and strengthen the connection between retailer and customer through communication channels previously only available in the online world.