Sprint to Success: Lessons from Targeting a Niche Audience at the Chicago Marathon

November 25, 2024

How a small budget made a big impact with UChicago Medicine’s programmatic digital out-of-home campaign.

// By Wendy Margolin //

Margolin-Wendy

In the fall of 2023, when HIPAA laws left a giant black hole in healthcare providers’ targeted marketing campaigns, UChicago Medicine marketers successfully targeted a niche audience, using digital programmatic out-of-home (pDOOH) advertising, geofencing, and geopathing.

Geofencing is a digital marketing tactic that uses GPS, Wi-Fi, or cellular data to create virtual boundaries around specific locations. When people enter these boundaries, such as driving by a billboard with geofencing, their information can be captured.

Geopathing focuses on analyzing movement patterns and travel routes within a larger geographic area, such as during the Chicago Marathon.

Lisa Spengler

Lisa Spengler, director of digital engagement at UChicago Medicine

Lisa Spengler, director of digital engagement at UChicago Medicine, and Andrew Perry, vice president of growth at Mediate.ly, shared at HCIC how they leaned on old-fashioned billboard advertising armed with real-time audience capture to build a local niche audience at the 2023 Chicago Marathon.

The campaign demonstrates the power of combining offline display ads and digital retargeting to create an engaged audience for service lines like primary care, urgent care, and orthopedics.

Read on to learn how this tactic allows health system marketers to target visitors to a space with display ads, while also capturing audience information for retargeting.


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