Maximizing Holiday Sales: Exploring the Impact of In-Office Advertising on Online Purchasing Behavior

Many luxury brands have shifted from broadcast ads to streaming and digital video ads in recent years. While both offer benefits, digital ads are pulling ahead because of their potential for personalization, greater analytics opportunities, and their influence on consumer behavior. However, ads on personal devices aren’t enough to create a fully immersive environment that engages with luxury buyers at multiple points throughout the day, every day. 

Enter in-office advertising—the perfect medium for targeting consumers with extensive spending power by keeping them engaged with high-quality, curated media that stays top of mind when they shop on their lunch hour or online at work. When it comes to holiday shopping, which is expected to reach $1.328 trillion this year, advertising strategies need to be comprehensive, finely tuned, efficient, and effective—that is, advertising that reaches active audiences without wasting marketing dollars on reaching audiences outside of your target.

According to June 2023 research conducted by Captivate, 53% of high-income earners plan on spending at least $2,000 on luxuries through the end of the year. A large percentage of that will be holiday shopping, and many of those professionals will shop either online in the office or at retail locations near their workspace. That means your clients’ campaigns should be in the same place: in the work environment, during the work day. 

In-office advertising on public screens in elevators, hallways, and lobbies engages these shoppers as they’re planning and doing holiday shopping—and even better, it catches their eye at a time when competition for their attention is at its lowest. Keep reading to find out how in-office advertising can make campaigns far more efficient and effective.

Start by Considering the Efficiency of In-Office Advertising

Highly effective marketing agencies ensure their clients are getting the best possible results for every advertising dollar by:

• Making sure the creative strategy is very tightly aligned with key customer personas
• Putting those ads in front of high-earning consumers that match the customer persona characteristics
• Ensuring the media plan includes as little waste as possible

The more effectively you can wield different media and advertising channels to ensure every touchpoint is an engaging and fruitful one to create quality impressions, the more effectively your clients’ budgets are allocated and the more value everyone receives. 

Your objective isn’t to spend as little money as possible—it’s to waste as little money as possible. If it costs $5 to reach an audience that’s 5% likely to make a purchase based on viewing that ad (a $100 conversion), that’s superior to spending $2 to reach a consumer with a 1% chance of making a purchase (a $200 conversion).

Related: Why Agencies Should Care About Contextual Advertising Effectiveness in 2023

While that may be a simplistic example, it represents a powerful concept: the more tailored and exclusive of a medium you select for displaying your clients’ holiday shopping ads, the better the results. And when you choose a highly targeted platform like in-office video advertising, you can more tightly focus on the shoppers you want to reach most.

Align Your Clients’ Ads With Exactly the Right Audience Through In-Office Advertising

Your clients need to reach upscale, high-earning professionals. The demographic and interest-based details of each customer persona will be very specific, down to the news sources they trust, the hobbies they prefer, and the brands that represent their values. 

In-office advertising providers can work with brands to target locations that over-index for their target audience personas. Holiday shopping campaigns before and during the holiday season benefit from these types of targeting:

• Geographical: The ads will target individual locations or wide ranging areas like DMAs. They can also serve a specific radius around proximity to specific store locations. 
• Time: Organize your campaigns to reach people on specific days (such as Fridays or in the lead-up to Black Friday) or even at specific times of day (such as right before lunch).
• Detailed insights about the building’s occupants: These targeting factors include the industry and size of the building, revenue, and more.
• Browsing and visitation data: Your ad campaigns will benefit from daily data-backed insights into consumer behavior.

Choose the Best Times for Different Ad Campaigns

The time an ad is served is important, especially if you are launching a campaign that leads up to a grand opening, Black Friday or if your stores will benefit from lunchtime traffic. To take full advantage of in-office advertising, you might:

• Show Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads with exclusive online shopping deals: Today’s shoppers spend time at work browsing for the perfect gifts or purchasing products.
• Stay top-of-mind with product ads near elevators, lobbies, and major hallways so professionals are reminded about presents they should buy when they get back to their desks.
• Show ads of retailers near coffee shops and restaurants on the same street around lunchtime: This can prompt viewers to swing by and make a purchase on their lunch break.
• Start prioritizing holiday shopping advertisements for when audiences will be most engaged—October through December.

Each of these approaches is effective; they align with what shoppers care about at each moment to increase the likelihood of an online search, adding a product to a shopping cart (which can be followed up with your automated shopping cart email campaign), or completing a purchase.

Spend Saved Dollars to Expand Targeted Reach

Along with that effectiveness comes efficiency. Because your ad placement caught shoppers at just the right moment, you need fewer ads and touchpoints to convert a shopper to a customer. As a result, all of the dollars that might have been wasted on less effective channels or viewers that weren’t a good fit can go to better efforts: additional campaigns, reaching new audiences, or upselling new customers.

Start Displaying Your Ads Just as Holiday Shopping Begins

Timing is everything for both building rapport with shoppers and staying top-of-mind when they’re most likely to make their purchasing decisions. This includes timing throughout the work day for general online shopping, around lunch breaks for quick and convenient in-store purchases (including holiday gifts for coworkers and assistants!), and end-of-day ads for retailers between their offices and homes.

Build out your larger calendar with these key insights:

• 41% of high-earning professionals start their holiday shopping in October or earlier, so start rolling out holiday shopping campaigns in September.
• 46% of shoppers start in November, so reserve new ads for catching everyone’s attention now that 87% of shoppers are prioritizing holiday shopping.
• 14% of shoppers don’t start holiday shopping until December—now’s the time for ad creative that focuses on convenience and speed.

Target Luxury Ads to Luxury Spenders—And Reduce Uncertainties in Your Client’s Buyer Personas

Again, one of the most critical aspects of advertising in today’s world is your media strategy and channel planning tactics—ultimately, choosing the right location that has access to the right audience. The more the ads align with the viewers, the less likely the touchpoint is to be off-the-mark—and that matters when every touchpoint carries an opportunity cost. We conduct campaign effectiveness studies to measure ad performance so they can become more engaging over time.

Related: Efficient Targeting: Contextual Programmatic Advertising Strategies for Media Planning

Make Your Clients’ Ads Effect In-Office Talking Points and Behaviors

The attention economy is incredibly competitive, and you and your clients have two options: become more attention-getting, or find where attention is freer. The first strategy is risky—the second strategy, however, is easy. In-office ads capture attention during the ‘in-between’ parts of professionals’ busy schedules when:

• They’re in an elevator but can’t pull out their phone
• They’re walking back to their office after a meeting
• They’re walking through the lobby
• They’re in the breakroom and chatting while making coffee or waiting to access the snacks

Office environments are full of opportunities to engage working professionals and get them excited about holiday shopping and specific products or campaigns. When your clients’ ads are prominent in these in-between times, they can be another touchpoint driving brand recognition, a reminder to buy a gift, or even the inspiration for chitchat and networking.

Measure Your Results During and After the Holiday Season to Prove Your Value to Your Clients

The impact of good holiday campaigns doesn’t end with the final holiday sale. As a media strategist, part of the value you provide is in the analytics you can show your clients. What was their ROI? What campaigns and strategies worked well enough to repeat last year, and which ones had a relatively unimpressive ROI? 

This is more than an opportunity to proactively plan for the 2024 holiday shopping season. It’s also an opportunity to validate your clients’ trust in your services. Map out the success of in-office advertising, the efficiency your services brought in, and the additional revenue they saw due to your advertising strategy that they may not have otherwise realized.

The Power of Holiday Shopping Ads: It’s All About Audience and Location

The holiday shopping season is a pivotal period for the vast majority of retailers and luxury brands. A misstep here could make the following year tight, but a surge in sales can propel profitable growth. Make your media strategy services stronger by working with Captivate, your partner in achieving in-office advertising that brings high-earning consumers and luxury brands together. Reach out today to see where our screens can fit into your plans.