Retail Leans On Programmatic Advertising To Deliver Directed Ads In Real Time

Thomas Curvelle, a programmer at HiveStack, shared the marketing technology company’s development of a programmatic advertising campaign for Nordstrom Rack that targeted digital out-of-home devices. The results were very impressive.

“We’re bringing programmatic advertising, like Google double-click, to the out-of-home world,” Curvelle said, “meaning you can now target audiences, specific demographics, and retarget them to deliver ads programmatically based on where they are and concentrations of people. We do this by tapping into mobile data streams to get the concentrations of people.

“Right now, we’re running an ad campaign with Nordstrom Rack, running on Lamar Digital Billboards. Nordstrom Rack came to us and said, ‘We’re opening up a new store in Lancaster, PA, and we want to target people going to our competitors’ stores, like Marshalls, CJ Maxx, Kohls.’ We went into our software, geofenced these areas, and looked back at the past three months of mobile device id’s that were entering into these locations. This enabled us to get an idea of who was going to these competitor stores so that we could retarget these device id’s as they drove down the highways or walked past digital mediums. What this allows us to do is programmatically deliver ads to the boards that have the highest concentration of people within your targeted demographics.

“First, what we do is we start off with control groups—people who are always going to Nordstrom Rack no matter what, whether they are exposed to an ad or not. We take our target demographic, our targeted audience, and we see people that are exposed to these digital boards but not exposed to the ad, and then observe them going into Nordstrom Rack. We then compare that to the people that were exposed to the ad and then went into Nordstrom Rack. In this particular case, so far with this campaign we noticed a 38% increase in foot traffic into Nordstrom Rack for people that were exposed to this ad. Which is insane. We now have a fully measurable system to see exactly how effective an ad is.

“Moreover, we have something called ‘stolen impressions’ where we’re analyzing the data afterwards, checking to see if the people in our targeted demographic who were exposed to the ad went to Nordstrom Rack but didn’t return to the competitor stores. Which is pretty good, if you’re looking at margins. All of this is driven through our intelligent ad server. It does all the math, all the hard work, determining what to play where and when.”

With one out of every three customers being new customers in the Nordstrom Rack campaign, it’s clear that companies looking to target out-of-home shoppers on their digital devices would do well to take advantage of HiveStack’s programmatic advertising.

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Image

Latest

Sarah Dawn talks PayPal Business
Transform Your Payment Processes with PayPal Business Tools
June 23, 2025

Tired of complicated payment systems? Discover how PayPal is simplifying invoicing and payment experiences for small business owners like Sarah Dawn of Swell Little Donuts. See how innovation meets reliability with PayPal’s tailored solutions. Why PayPal Matters Now In an era where seamless transactions can make or break a business, PayPal offers accessible tools…

Read More
leadership resilience
Rewriting the Odds: Leadership Resilience at the Heart of Norberto Orellana’s Rise
June 23, 2025

Economic mobility is often portrayed as a straight climb. In reality, it’s shaped by adversity, identity, and access to opportunity. As research from the University of Michigan notes, mobility requires not only income, education, and employment, but also more intangible resources such as social inclusion and power—the ability to make choices and exert influence….

Read More
revenue growth strategy
Aligning People, Process, and Innovation Creates a Revenue Growth Strategy Built for Long-Term Impact—Not Just Quick Wins in High Trust Industries
June 20, 2025

Law enforcement agencies are under growing pressure to investigate faster, operate smarter, and serve increasingly complex communities. Yet many still rely on legacy systems that slow progress. Private sector partners are stepping in, offering tools that bridge this divide using a focused revenue growth strategy that balances speed, trust, and long-term impact. A recent…

Read More
human-centered
How Human-Centered Design Led to a Startup Accelerator for Education: A Conversation with Transcend Network’s Co-founder Michael Narea
June 20, 2025

The convergence of human-centered design and education innovation is reshaping how edtech ventures emerge and scale. As AI enables hyper-efficiency and bootstrapped entrepreneurship becomes more viable, the real differentiator is empathy—founders who listen deeply to users before building solutions. A McKinsey study of 300 public companies found that design-led organizations significantly outperformed their peers, with…

Read More