Step inside the Mile High Flea Market, and you’ll feel the buzz. It’s a legend, a business and a party all at once. This open-air market has been giving Denver a spot to buy and sell for more than 40 years. Got fresh produce, tools, live music, great food or a six-inch dancing wombatroid to sell? This is the place. But the Flea’s traffic had remained flat for years. And they weren’t happy to double down on a dwindling base. They asked us for the impossible. We had to drive increases across three audiences: new buyers, repeat buyers and sellers.
In order to increase the volume of first-time and inactive sellers, Heinrich supported a promotion for $25 discounted spaces. This didn’t cost the Flea much, and it allowed us to develop a hyper-local incremental media approach that consisted of quick-to-market, high-profile tactics that we could run in real-time.
The media team cherry-picked seven digital OOH bulletins on prominent arteries near the Flea. Also in the mix, gas pump signage and window clings at 30 gas stations and convenience stores, front-page and far-forward strip ads in major Hispanic newspapers and targeted digital display and paid social.
The click through of standard display
New and incremental visits
In 2018, we found the future. We initiated a disruptive, AI-powered mobile display campaign aimed at buyers. This was even more difficult than it sounds. Increasing visitation is two-pronged—you need to attract new customers and increase the frequency of existing customers. We used real-time data points stemming from the devices that are with all of us all the time—our mobile phones. Evaluating our highest-potential target audience’s travel time to the Flea, their behavioral attributes and their location-based device ID history data allowed us to pursue both metrics. We engaged customers who hadn’t been around for six months at least. And we re-engaged and retargeted customers who had. The campaign was optimized against incremental visits and footfall uplift in real time.
The data-focused, local market digital strategy helped us chase more audiences than we really strictly had the budget to chase. We found innovative ways to move the needle when the industry was just happy to stay flat.
