Audience Spectrum in Action | London & Culture Calling Arts

The Project 

London & Culture Calling is an arts, culture, leisure and tourism marketing agency specialising in printed media display and digital marketing, including a popular ‘What's On’ website.  

They serve several hundred media display units in local neighbourhoods across Greater London and the South East, displaying marketing materials from cultural organisations looking to reach new audiences and increase brand awareness. London & Culture Calling wanted to improve targeting and understanding of the population around their media display units, so they could develop their services for an ever-changing market. They chose to use Audience Spectrum to make data-driven decisions in their services and speak a common language with their clients, many of whom were already using this segmentation model. 

Our Approach 

To provide the correct data on each media display point, we created a method based on the population the venue displaying the media display point primarily serves. We were not analysing the venue that hosts the media display unit, but the end consumer, and potential audience, for the media content itself.  

The venues hosting the displays are a mixture of cafes, bars and restaurants, all of which primarily serve their hyperlocal community. We profiled the population using Audience Spectrum, focusing on a 10-minute walking time around each venue to determine the dominant segments at 1st and 2nd tier. Hence, this group within the population is the majority who see the media display. For venues such as libraries that serve a larger local area, we expanded the walking time radius from the venue to 20 minutes take this into account. 

Using this method, we profiled the community venues across London and Culture Calling’s networks to provide a more detailed overview of which Audience Spectrum segments they serve, providing options for clients to target specific audiences more effectively. This same approach could also be used for other types of out-of-home media displays, using other data metrics available on the population or for cultural organisations using them for other types of geographic targeting. 

Our Findings 

The activity proved an interesting concept of how media display targeting could be implemented using cultural engagement data on the population focusing on geo-location. As well as through purely using population census and other socio-economic data, or assumptions around set communities. Assumptions that often become outdated as the population and businesses within the communities themselves change. 

London & Culture Calling have used these finding to create four new networks which target the most culturally engaged Metroculturals M1 & M2, and Experience Seekers E1 & E2. In addition to this, they have developed further ideas to improve the development of its services and the cultural organisations it serves across London and the South East. We also highlighted interest from clients already familiar with Audience Spectrum, whom we await further feedback from as they evaluate the effectiveness of this area of their campaigns. Considerations are now in place to explore similar options for its media services in the North West.