Wildwoods Air Show Geofencing Campaign – Driving Regional Awareness and Capturing Real-World Insights

Client Name: Greater Wildwoods Tourism Improvement and Development Authority (GWTIDA)

City, State: Atlantic City, and Wildwood, New Jersey 

Industry: Tourism, Destination Marketing

Overview

The Greater Wildwoods Tourism Improvement and Development Authority (GWTIDA) promotes tourism across the five-mile island of the Wildwoods. To strengthen its regional marketing strategy, GWTIDA wanted to better understand audiences attending nearby events — and measure real-world engagement with its own.

Sparkable partnered with Complementics, a national mobile data and geolocation analytics provider, to execute two connected geofencing campaigns:

1. The Atlantic City Air Show, to capture mobile device IDs for future Wildwoods Air Show remarketing; and
2. The Wildwoods Air Show, to measure attendance, dwell time, and audience behavior.

Together, these campaigns provided GWTIDA with verified, privacy-compliant datasets to enhance its tourism analytics and digital strategy.

The Challenge

GWTIDA sought to:

• Collect mobile device IDs at the Atlantic City Air Show to create a qualified, remarketing-ready audience for future Wildwoods promotions.
• Capture accurate, real-time device data during the Wildwoods Air Show to estimate attendance and audience engagement.
• Manage both projects within short timeframes, coordinating across multiple municipalities and a third-party data vendor.
• Overcome data challenges inherent to outdoor, high-density environments where signal congestion and privacy settings limit collection rates.

Our Approach

Phase I – Atlantic City Air Show Data Collection

• Defined and deployed a large-scale geofence covering all of Absecon Island and Brigantine, encompassing the full footprint of the Atlantic City Air Show.
• Captured anonymized mobile ad IDs from attendees to build a remarketing audience for the Wildwoods Air Show.
• Delivered a verified dataset to GWTIDA for future audience activation and advertising use.

Phase II – Wildwoods Air Show Attendance Analysis

• Designed and implemented a precise geofence around the Wildwoods beach and boardwalk viewing areas, focusing on crowd density zones.
• Partnered with Complementics to capture anonymized mobile device data during the event window.
• Worked with the vendor to reprocess the data and manually expand the geofence, increasing total verified devices from 7,781 to 15,445 unique IDs.
• Delivered final datasets for GWTIDA’s internal analytics, sponsorship reporting, and future tourism campaigns.

Coordination and Reporting

• Managed all data vendor communication, quality control, and post-event verification.
• Provided comparative insights between Atlantic City and Wildwoods event audiences.
• Ensured compliance with data privacy and anonymization standards.

Results

• Cross-Event Audience Insight: Captured tens of thousands of verified devices across both air shows, creating measurable overlap between two major regional tourism events.
• Validated Attendance Data: Final Wildwoods dataset included 15,445 verified devices — a statistically valid audience sample despite high crowd density and signal congestion.
• Improved Reporting: Provided GWTIDA with concrete, vendor-backed data to strengthen post-event press releases and sponsorship materials.
• Scalable Model: Established a repeatable process for future tourism data collection and remarketing campaigns.

Key Takeaways

• Event-based data collection works: Large-scale events are powerful sources of location-based audience insights for tourism marketing.
• Partnership drives accuracy: Collaboration with Complementics ensured credible, privacy-compliant datasets despite technical challenges.
• Smaller footprint = lower capture: The Wildwoods Air Show geofence was significantly smaller than Atlantic City’s coverage area, explaining lower total device counts.
• Data = opportunity: Even without advertising execution, verified mobile data empowers tourism boards to improve marketing precision, measure success, and attract sponsorships.