Geopath Member Spotlight: Mesmerize
A conversation with Evan Gordon, Senior Vice President at Mesmerize
About Mesmerize
In the last two years, Mesmerize has gone through major changes – pivoting from a company primarily focused on point of care advertising in doctors’ offices, community-based organizations, clinics, and pharmacies to a more all-encompassing OOH network including place-based OOH and transit working alongside our best-in-class static and digital solutions at the point of care.
Evan Gordon , Senior Vice President – Mesmerize
The transit business has especially benefited from a big shift in strategy. Our recent wins have developed a comprehensive footprint across the Midwest, and the focus on ‘college towns’ offers advertisers the ability to reach the highly coveted 18-24 audience in Bloomington (Indiana University), South Bend (University of Notre Dame), Lafayette (Purdue University), Champaign-Urbana (University of Illinois), State College (Penn State University), and Grand Rapids (Grand Valley State).
What makes these audiences unique?
Our client and agency partners are consistently challenging us to deliver stronger engagement with their unique audiences, and the OOH community at-large is lucky to have more tools than ever before to achieve that goal.
From a point of care perspective, we’re able to focus messaging specifically towards patients of a certain diagnosis or condition, eliminating the scattershot waste that used to occur and giving us the ability to confidently reaching the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
Transit and other traditional OOH have always been reach and frequency drivers for campaigns, but the ability to layer on third-party data and analytics allows us to provide stronger recommendations and deliver competitive metrics provided by other media disciplines.
Being a Geopath member
Coming to Mesmerize after 10+ years of media buying experience, one of my first goals was to have the company join Geopath. The services offered across measurement, insights, and market research is essential to providing the highest level of service to our advertising partners as well as remaining competitive in the OOH space. We’ve already started to see the benefits of our membership and look forward to continuing to provide stronger metrics and reporting.
Key opportunities and challenges for OOH
The challenges and opportunities for OOH can often be two sides of the same coin. While the solutions we have in place to be more targeted and leverage more data open up a host of opportunities for grabbing a larger slice of media budgets, we can’t forget about the ‘wow factor’ OOH delivers. We need to be careful about not letting the pendulum swing too far towards left-brain thinking and
deliver the right balance of storytelling and data.
Common misconceptions about OOH
We always work to fight against the idea that OOH is strictly an ego play. Media practitioners outside of OOH understand the value of having their brand seen, but most don’t take the time to think about how we can be included in their larger research and analytics reporting.
There are a ton of agency and sales organizations in the OOH space doing an amazing job of educating their clients to what OOH can provide to their media plans outside of impressions and it will be exciting to continue watching that conversation evolve in the future.
What makes for a highly effective OOH campaign?
Ultimately, it comes down to recognizing the client’s goals and how we can deliver on that creatively and effectively. What I consistently see from successful campaigns is a comprehensive understanding of who the brand is trying to target, and how their audience wants to receive the message. When campaigns are approached in that way, we can start to push beyond a one-way conversation into a dialogue that creates a connection.
