A leading pool and outdoor living distributor needed to quickly understand the reach and impact of different media planning scenarios. By utilizing AI to size DMAs and accelerate planning, the brand built a precise national plan to drive efficient, high-intent traffic to dealers.
The challenge
Limited budget and complex targeting strained media planning
Ansira partnered with a leading North American distributor in the pool and outdoor living industry who manufactures and distributes pool chemicals, equipment, and materials that help retailers, service professionals, and builders maintain, upgrade, and construct residential and commercial pools.
The company’s US national media plan orchestrates a limited budget across its 4,500‑dealer network, spanning two core business units — chemicals and builder — and two regions: the Sun Belt and the Snow Belt. Spend is weighted by dealer volume within each business unit and region to prioritize markets with the greatest revenue and coverage potential.
An omnichannel mix of paid search, Meta social, display, and Nextdoor is deployed for each business unit to build both brand demand and capture high‑intent prospects. Campaigns are geo‑targeted within a 15- to 40-mile radius of qualified dealers and drive traffic to co‑branded locator and landing pages optimized for calls, forms, directions, and store visits — scaling national investment into efficient, local outcomes at the point of sale.
The company’s national budget was minimal, so every decision about where and how to show up had to be highly efficient.
Additionally, shifting from a 15‑mile radius around 4,500+ locations to designated market area (DMA)-level targeting across Sun Belt and Snow Belt states created a complex planning problem. Ansira needed to quickly understand the reach and impact of different scenarios, as consolidating all the location and DMA data would normally take days of manual work, straining team bandwidth and timelines.
The solution
AI-driven approach transforms complex planning into actionable strategy
The core objective was to drive brand awareness and generate high‑intent leads through an omnichannel digital strategy. The campaign was aimed at reaching pool owners and prospects to efficiently convert national investment into local outcomes such as calls, form fills, directions, and store visits that fuel incremental dealer leads and product sales.
The challenges mentioned and the brand’s goals drove Ansira to use AI alongside their expert services to size DMAs and accelerate planning.
Using AI in the planning process created measurable impact even before launch. With AI, Ansira quickly mapped how many DMAs fell into the company’s Sun Belt and Snow Belt definitions and the relative size of each, allowing the team to right-size budget allocation by region and belt instead of relying on a blunt 15‑mile radius around 4,500+ locations.
The results
AI streamlines planning and enhances execution
By using AI, Ansira helped replace a manual process that normally required multiple days of data consolidation with a plan built in just a few hours, effectively cutting planning time by more than 80% and freeing strategy and activation teams to focus on refinement rather than data wrangling.
The result is a far more precise, belt-based national plan that aligns limited dollars to the most important DMAs and sets up the omnichannel campaign to drive efficient, high-intent traffic to dealers.
