Most OOH plans start with available inventory and back into an audience rationale. The Alberta iGaming work behind Adapt Media’s planning guide ran the opposite direction, starting from 443,000 online sports bettors and ending at the screens they pass daily. 1 The method has 4 steps and works for any audience a planner can name.
Define the audience before touching inventory
Audience-first OOH planning starts with sizing, not screens. Using Vividata and Statistics Canada, an audience gets a definition and a number. In Alberta, online sports bettors are 10.8% of adults, 443,000 people, a base that grew 44% across 5 Vividata waves. 1 A defined, sized audience turns an OOH buy from a coverage argument into a reach calculation.
Find where the audience over-indexes
The index is where audience-first OOH planning earns its keep. Heavy convenience shoppers in Alberta index 188 on online sports betting and 184 on online poker. 1 The index points to environments, not just formats, and it usually points somewhere the plan was not looking. For the betting audience it pointed to the convenience counter, not the highway board.
Map the over-index to owned networks
An index is only actionable if screens exist where it concentrates. Behavioural affinity maps to convenience and gas environments, to multicultural retail screens and to government service locations like Alberta Registries. Multicultural and diaspora overlays are built into the Adapt Media network rather than bolted on, so a diaspora heavy audience definition maps as cleanly as a mainstream one.
Activate and measure
The final step connects exposure to action. Mobile retargeting across 22 million plus Canadian phones carries the exposed audience into display, online video and social, and foot traffic attribution ties real world exposure to online outcomes. The framing for any brief is simple. Bring a defined audience, and the method sizes it, finds its over-index and reaches it on owned networks.
The Alberta iGaming Media Planning Guide shows the method applied end to end on a market that went live this month. Download it, or bring us your audience.
References
- Vividata Study of the Canadian Consumer and Vividata Sports, Gaming and Betting Study 2026, via Adapt Media Alberta iGaming Media Planning Guide. https://vividata.ca/