David Jowett, president of DAC Group Europe: “Marketing in 2017 will be very personal, very local and very digital.”

We believe that where you are matters as much as who you are to brands. We help brands take their national brand conversations down to a local level. So much time, money and effort is spent building brands on the national and international stage – but actually customers spend most of their time at the local level, especially in the age of smart phones.

Think of shopping today. You use your smartphone to navigate, to find things, goods, shops, and check reviews. That last shopping yard is very personal, very local and very digital now. Put “dry cleaners near me” into Google and you’ll get a map with flags showing you the range of results by location. We’re already used to that as consumers but it’s still relatively new to brands. Searches of that type now account for 20 per cent of all search results.

Back when I was growing up, local advertising consisted of flyers, yellow pages, local radio ads, maybe some free-sheets, but that was about it. Nowadays, brands have the ability to really engage customers on a hyperlocal basis through digital media. Changing technology has led to a change in consumer behavior, which has, in turn, created a huge opportunity for retail businesses in particular.

Beyond the rise of smartphones, what other technological changes are driving this trend towards ‘localisation’?

Technology tends to follow consumer behavior more quickly than brands do. That’s probably happened here again.

For example, Google is driving hard into the location space with significant changes to its local search listings, including paid local ads, which now appear ahead of organic search results. That’s a really big move by Google and it reflects consumer behaviour. Google also recently rolled out an updated, cleaner look for its Google Maps search results, incorporating a new listings card for local businesses.

These tech businesses now think a lot about where you are, just as much as who you are. If the biggest technology businesses in the world are driving hard into the location space, they are doing it for good reason: customers care about this stuff. Brands always follow a bit more cautiously but it’s time for brands to realign their campaign thinking and truly engage with customers on a local level.

What sort of business is this hyperlocal approach to marketing most relevant to?

DAC’s solutions are designed for enterprise sized brands with a large-scale, multiple location footprint.

Beyond the massive rise of local search, customer behavior is increasingly driven by where they are in lots of other ways. For example, for brands that have both a digital and physical presence, ‘click-and-collect’ services have become huge. I read recently that three years ago, click-and-collect accounted for roughly 20 per cent of Next’s e-commerce business; today, it’s more than 70 per cent, which is huge growth. Clearly, people want the convenience of the e-commerce shopping experience, along with the chance to physically interact with the product and deal with any issues or problems face-to-face in-store. (And just watch how quickly ecommerce giant Amazon rolls out their physical retail footprint globally).

Likewise, locally-sourced food is booming in popularity at the moment. British consumers are beginning to care more and more about where our food comes from. Has it come from New Zealand when it could have come from 100 miles down the road? The customer is moving back to caring about locality of produce and brands need to reflect that.

Unfortunately, many brands are still running a bit behind the curve and need to look at making the shift to taking campaigns down to the local level – which is where we come in!

If you’re a retail business online, DAC Group has built technology that allows all the major search platforms to find accurate localised information about your business more easily. There’s nothing more frustrating than being given wrong info online about, for example, the opening times of a local shop or the availability of stock locally, so it’s crucially important that brands provide a great customer experience the first time they ask for local information.

DAC Group has also developed technology that helps brands personalise their content at scale, tailoring and matching it to the right person at the right location. Our proprietary technology reflects our positioning as a company – our goal is to help brands take advantage of location as well as customer identity.

What can you share on DAC’s expansion plans in Europe?

DAC Group was founded in Toronto in 1972. We currently operate six offices across North America, working with clients such as Nordstrom, Bridgestone, Firestone and GE. I joined the organisation last year following a stint working in Canada where I met the company founder and accepted his invitation to head up DAC Europe. We currently employ around 50 people in the UK and around 400 globally, working with clients such as Center Parcs, easyCar and David Lloyd Leisure. We’re also currently planning our presence in Germany, France and Spain and we’ve just announced the acquisition of Edinburgh-based digital agency Ambergreen.