Geo-Conquesting Plans Built on Catchment, Not Radius

A five hundred metre radius around a competitor's door is the most common conquesting brief I receive, and it is wrong in a way you can measure. Catchment is asymmetric. In the mobility panels I buy in Sao Paulo, a mid-size pet retail store draws its visits from an area shaped by an eight-minute drive and by which side of the avenue it sits on, and roughly a third to a half of those visits arrive from a commute route rather than from home. Half the screens inside the radius are behind the store from the shopper's point of view. Nobody passes them on the way in. What this engagement produces: A planning document and a screen-ID allowlist as a file your agency or in-house buyer executes. Each row carries the screen ID, the operator, the venue type, the recommended daypart and one line explaining why that screen is on the list. There is a second file, the exclusion list, naming the screens inside the radius that should not be bought and why. In practice the exclusion list is the one that changes the buy, because it is the one nobody else writes. How the catchment is drawn: Drive-time and walk-time isochrones computed over OpenStreetMap road geometry, so one-way avenues, rivers and rail lines cut the shape the way they cut real journeys. IBGE census sectors and CNEFE address data for household composition inside those shapes. A geodemographic overlay where the category needs one. A mobility panel for observed visit origins, which is what separates a plausible catchment from a real one. Points of interest from Overture Maps to locate competitor and own-network doors accurately, because retailer store locators are wrong often enough to matter. Where conquesting does not pay, and I will say so: Categories where the decision precedes the trip. Nobody standing outside a bank branch is choosing a current account on impulse, and the same is true for post-paid mobile plans and insurance renewals. Categories where switching cost is measured in paperwork rather than in reais. Categories where the competitor's shopper is already loyal enough that the honest recommendation is to spend the money on your own catchment defence instead. Roughly one engagement in five ends with that recommendation, which is a legitimate outcome for the fee. Regulatory ground: Sao Paulo's Lei Cidade Limpa constrains what exists outdoors in the city, and a plan that assumes formats which cannot legally be there is fiction. Municipal ordinances differ across Brazilian cities and I check them per market before a screen enters the allowlist. CONAR's rules govern comparative claims, so the creative implication of a conquesting plan gets flagged where it is going to attract a complaint. I do not build plans that require a screen operator to break its own category exclusivity, because those clauses get enforced and you lose the flight rather than the operator losing anything. Not included: No media buying and no negotiation; this is the plan your buyer takes to market. No creative. No measurement build, which is separate work with separate data requirements. No footfall attribution study. Who should not book this: Brands with fewer than ten locations, where the analysis costs more than the media it directs. Anyone who has already decided which screens to buy and wants the document as justification. Anyone whose competitor set is national and undifferentiated by location, where the honest tool is a different channel entirely.