LocalFactor launched in 2021 as a response to a series of industry trends that were reshaping the advertising landscape. Market oversaturation, a rapidly changing data environment, underperforming creative content, and operational inefficiencies were just a few of the challenges brands and agencies faced. Our mission was, and continues to be, to tackle these issues head-on. What began as a small team with a big vision has evolved into a tech-enabled powerhouse. At the core of our growth and success is the LFG Performance Engine, designed to help brands and agencies operate more efficiently and effectively. As we celebrate our three-year anniversary, it’s the perfect time to share our perspective on the industry, our vision, and the exciting advancements in our solutions. What is the LFG Performance Engine? LocalFactor is dedicated to helping brands and agencies plan, buy, optimize, and measure omnichannel campaigns across TV, video, display, digital out-of-home (DOOH), audio, and social media. The LFG Performance Engine is our comprehensive system that streamlines the entire process from planning to activation, offering a seamless experience. The engine integrates audience, creative, inventory, and performance data to deliver optimal results. Audience Discovery: Our cookieless audience planning tool identifies where your audience is located. Campaign Delivery: We use geo-based IDs to ensure your campaign reaches the right audience with the right creative in the right inventory. Performance Optimization: Data from campaign performance is fed back into our unified reporting platform, allowing our team to derive insights and make adjustments that impact the entire campaign, rather than optimizing within a single channel. We are continually enhancing our capabilities, ensuring every step of the way is delivering on our mission. Meet the Geo-Graph™: The Foundation of the LFG Performance Engine To address the limitations of legacy identifiers and new alternative ID frameworks, LocalFactor developed the proprietary Geo-Graph™. Unlike traditional device graphs that map attributes to individual identifiers, the Geo-Graph™ stitches data to specific geographic areas. The aim is similar—identifying an advertiser’s target audience—but our approach ensures future-proofed, privacy-focused audience data and consistent cross-channel performance. For each campaign, we activate the Geo-Graph™ by creating LFIDs (LocalFactor IDs), using a brand’s specific audience factors. LFID algorithms use these factors to select localities that best match the target audience. The output is a cookieless segment that is easily activated across all channels. Where We Go Next By creating an LFID audience, campaigns are pre-optimized, setting the stage for efficiency and higher campaign ROI. With the Geo-Graph™ in place, our focus is now on integrating creative and contextual performance data. LocalFactor’s custom Attention+ format dynamically serves tailored content to LFID clusters, and robust creative reporting allows our team to leverage insights for ongoing optimization. Our goal is to enable real-time algorithmic optimizations based on these contextual performance signals, using the data surrounding every impression at the page or app level, to feed into our LFID algorithms. Maintaining a Human Element While AI and technology play an increasingly significant role in the advertising industry, we firmly believe in the creativity and innovation that people—especially our dedicated LFG’ers—bring to the table. We are investing heavily in technology but always ensure we have the right teams to support what we build.. This commitment to a human element is why so many of our clients continue to partner with us, confident that they will always have a dedicated team looking out for their best interests. Their team is fantastic – easy to work with and attentive to details. We look forward to continuing our partnership with them! Supervisor, Horizon Media As we celebrate three years of LocalFactor, we are proud of the progress we’ve made and excited about the future. Our LFG Performance Engine represents a significant leap forward in how brands and agencies can navigate the complex advertising landscape. With innovations like the Geo-Graph™ and a steadfast commitment to maintaining a human touch, we are well-positioned to continue driving success for our clients. To get the most performance out of digital campaigns in 2024 and beyond, advertisers can’t rest on the old way of executing campaigns. Solutions like the LFG Performance Engine do not require significant tech investments or ramp times, and can start delivering real results now. If you’re ready to see how, contact our team to schedule a demo or to learn more!
Why a Platform-Agnostic Approach Matters in Digital Advertising
In the early days of programmatic, media agencies or in-house brand teams often leveraged eight or more platforms via direct partnerships. However, as the industry matured, it became evident that this approach led to redundancy in both inventory and capabilities. This realization gave rise to the trend of supply path optimization (SPO). SPO can offer significant benefits for brands and agencies, as managing numerous direct partnerships with tech providers can be both challenging and costly, ultimately impacting ROI. Implementing SPO while still seeking to maximize the value of omnichannel campaigns across various channels and formats can be a balancing act. Because of this there is immense value in partnering with programmatic service providers that adopt a broad approach to the digital marketplace while still maintaining the tenets of SPO. The key lies in finding partners equipped with the right strategies, infrastructure, and expertise to effectively manage and execute campaigns across diverse platforms. What does a broad approach mean? For LocalFactor it means a platform-agnostic approach, not relying on a limited set of demand or supply-side solutions to execute campaigns for our advertising partners. By doing so we can deliver the utmost value for teams looking for either managed service and self-service solutions. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the key benefits to a platform-agnostic approach. The Right Tool for the Job Every platform has its strengths and weaknesses, which may not always be apparent upfront. A platform may provide the ability to activate in every channel, but depending on the origins of their tech, it doesn’t mean that they’re the best suited to execute across all of them. Their solutions might be highly optimized for CTV, but DOOH and audio are bolted on solutions that are not well integrated, as an example. By executing thousands of campaigns across all types of platforms, we’ve gained this insight and have ultimate flexibility to architect campaigns without the limitations that may be faced within a limited set of platforms. What does this look like in practice for an advertiser that partners with LocalFactor? The DOOH portion of a campaign can be executed within a purpose-built DOOH platform, while the CTV piece will go where we have tailored capabilities, premium inventory and the highest performance. Exclusive Inventory Availability & Formats This piece is an extension of finding the right tool for the job, as some supply or demand side platforms will have unique partnerships or access to premium inventory. For example, an advertiser may want to activate YouTube TV, requiring access to DV360. If that is not a platform currently in the mix, the options are to either find an alternative or sign on with DV360 directly, absorbing monthly minimum spend requirements. By using a partner like LocalFactor, we will be able to activate YouTube TV, while maintaining the flexibility to deliver other portions of the campaign on the platforms that make the most sense. Similarly, some platforms offer their own unique formats that are exclusive to campaigns activated within their walls. LocalFactor can take full advantage of these units for advertisers, with the ability to test each for the highest performance. Additionally, we can deploy our own unique Attention+ format across all platforms in CTV, video and display inventory. Cost Efficiencies A broad view of the supply and demand marketplace enables LocalFactor to find the most efficient path to premium inventory. We can see similar inventory coming from multiple locations and pivot to optimize towards the most efficient sources. And like we mentioned earlier, by using a platform-agnostic partner, advertisers unlock the benefits without absorbing the downsides of additional costs and headcount to manage direct relationships. Category Considerations Each platform approaches sensitive categories in their own way, and some advertisers may face restrictions in certain DSPs and social platforms. In other cases they may be prevented from running campaigns at all. By having flexibility to find the platforms that enable campaigns in sensitive categories, there is less friction to building and launching high performing omnichannel campaigns. Flexibility with Optimizations A common downside of operating in different ad platforms is that performance data becomes siloed, limiting the ability to make optimizations that improve the overall campaign. To address this, teams need a unified reporting system that can dynamically integrate with every platform, ingesting real-time data. However, this can be cumbersome as each platform integration is different, and will require engineering and IT involvement. LocalFactor has built integrations with all major platforms, including social media, to provide a comprehensive view of entire campaigns. This is leveraged by our own trading teams to make quick, data-driven decisions that improve performance, while providing advertisers self-serve access to the same data. This helps LocalFactor keep budgets fluid across the entire campaign, shifting investment where we find the strongest performance. The Human Element As automated and platform-driven the advertising industry becomes, there are still people involved in the strategic decision making process. Individuals have had their own experiences, positive or negative, with many of the solutions in the market over the past decade. Brand marketers and other client-side leaders may have their own opinions on who they are open to using, or completely avoiding. With a platform-agnostic approach it is possible to pivot as needed, while ensuring campaign needs and personal preferences are met. Wrapping Up Being platform-agnostic requires the right infrastructure to be able to execute the planning, buying and measurement of campaigns across platforms. Brands and agencies should focus on their areas of expertise, but remain open to everything available to them via strategic partners. LocalFactor built our LFID Engine performance platform, powered by AI and harnessed by strategists, traders and digital experts, to provide a unified experience that simplifies a complex ecosystem on an advertisers behalf. Want to learn more about LocalFactor’s platform-agnostic approach? Reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to make tailored recommendations for your campaigns.