Vistar Media is teaming up with Acxiom's LiveRamp to let advertisers deliver digital out-of-home ads based on their own customer data.

Vistar gathers location data from mobile operators, aggregates that information, then supplies it to partners for targeting out-of-home ads like the ones seen on bus shelters. Until now, however, customers had to rely on targets that Vistar built.

Now the company will be able to layer in marketers' proprietary customer data to help inform where ads are delivered.

Advertisers will send their CRM data and other customer transaction data to Acxiom, which will organize that information by geography and strip it of personally-identifiable data.

Once customer data is paired up with Vistar's mobile location data through LiveRamp, out-of-home campaigns can be targeted to groups that could include actual customers or, more likely, to audiences based on look-alike data modeling.

This isn't one-to-one targeting à la "Minority Report": Ads won't be targeted to specific individuals as their mobile devices are recognized by a billboard or sign in a shopping mall. But the process will add a layer of geographic relevance to targeting and measuring out-of-home ads based on patterns showing places that the highest densities of certain customers and customer segments visit.

Large brands get more out of capitalizing on consumers' macro movement patterns this way, at less risk of invading their privacy, than by targeting consumers directly based on their individual data, said Michael Provenzano, CEO and co-founder of Vistar Media.

"It's almost better to look at mass amounts of this data in a more statistical way," he said.

The process will also help measure the effectiveness of out-of-home ad exposure, according to Vistar. "The idea was really logical and basic," Mr. Provenzano said. "Let's now take a medium that's more traditional … and provide some ROI in why you should be investing in out-of-home in the first place."

Originally published by Advertising Age