Anna Forster¹, Carlo Lucheroni¹ and Stefan Gurtler², ¹University of Camerino, Italy, ¹University of Applied Science of North-west Switzerland, Switzerland

The Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising industry still struggles to achieve precision in getting audience attention focused, relying mainly on location-based targeting that neglects critical consumer context. This paper presents an Ontology-Enhanced Multimodal Targeting System designed to bridge this gap. The core innovation of the proposal is a domain-specific ontology that integrates anonymized mobile Global Positioning System (GPS) data and real-time contextual inputs (e.g., time, weather). This semantic framework enables the operational advertisement targeting system to move beyond data correlation, inferring audience insights that are synthesized into a composite business-centric Recommendation Score (MR). A field experiment validates the system’s performance against a traditional baseline, demonstrating a 220% relative uplift in relevant advertisement impressions. The presented findings establish a quantifiable and privacyconscious methodology for optimizing DOOH advertising delivery, possibly positioning the proposed ontology-enhanced approach as a foundation for privacy-conscious contextual personalization.

Advertising; Digital Out-Of-Home; Mobile GPS; Ontology; Contextual Targeting; Audience