During lockdowns, we’ve seen pictures of roads with very little traffic and inner-city shopping areas with virtually no people, but elsewhere it is a different story.
Nearly 60% of workers are unable to do their jobs from home and many of the children of essential workers are still attending schools, with neighborhood stores and local retailers adapting to these times and, in some cases, thriving.
As a country, we have become more local, with people out exercising or shopping close to home, in places they wouldn’t have been before. This means Out-Of-Home (OOH) audiences are still there and the demand for technology to find them is here right now.
Companies learn from tough times and the past two years have seen the OOH industry busy investing in the technology it needs to deliver smarter, more flexible, and better targeted outdoor campaigns, to reach and engage evolving audiences.
The latest PwC Media and Entertainment Outlook report on the surface painted a sobering picture of the effects of COVID-19 on the media industry, in particular, the OOH sector, which saw 2020 spend drop by 39%.
With 2021-22 expected to be a recovery year for outdoor advertising, much of the growth is being driven by digital OOH. This includes digital bus shelters on high streets, huge digital billboards on roadsides, and digital screens in supermarkets, shopping centers, gyms, and transport hubs – airports, train stations, and so on. These formats aren’t new, but thanks to ever-evolving technology their application is set to move into a vastly different place than when digital screens first started appearing.
There are plenty of good reasons to be bullish about digital-out-of-home (DOOH) for one thing, people are coming out of quarantine and are starting to get back to their routines- offices, restaurants, shopping, gym, and marketers will be keen to get their attention. As it becomes increasingly challenging to reach today’s consumers in the fragmented media landscape, the effectiveness of DOOH advertising has become more significant to brand marketers. DOOH provides a bridge between context, location, and creativity. It ranks high in relevance and favorable recall—vital components of any media campaign, due to its high-level impact and flexibility, relevant to each unique environment, public or private, outside the home. DOOH is about the audience and not the medium.
OOH has moved into a new era where it is powered by programmatic technology. It uses the same buying mechanism as online and mobile ads and is similar to how most major currency and stock market trades are now made. Programmatic advertising uses multiple sources of data to execute decision-making in real-time, and across multiple data sets at speed and, importantly, in volume.
OOH as an advertising medium works best when it is noticeable in large numbers, or on big sites for maximum impact, so the ambition of programmatic advertising is to deliver smarter, not smaller, campaigns.
These smarter campaigns come about from the use of wide-ranging data sets. The combination of sources allows tighter targeting and ensures big budgets are delivered to a greater level of efficiency than was previously possible.
With programmatic OOH, brands have far more control over the context in which their ads appear. A hot chocolate beverage brand, for example, could set up a campaign that only activates when the temperature drops below 15°C, only play out between midday and 6 PM, and is only displayed on screens in close proximity to coffee shops or supermarkets that stock the brand.
The technology allows a certain timeframe and budget to be determined upfront, with the flexibility to target by screen location, time, and context, so clients can set and forget.
Using anonymized mobile data also enables targeting based on behavioral characteristics whether it be coffee lovers, gym-goers, or online gamers, for example, ensuring the right audience sees the most relevant ads.
The digital screens we pass by that used to have a handful of ads scrolling in the same order all week may now display 100 different ads across the day, depending on the time and context.
Expect to see ads for coffee brands in the morning, TV news shows from Nine or Seven on the evening commute. Brands will be able to change their creative 50 times in one day, in a way that traditional paper posted campaigns can’t, to ensure it is relevant and engaging to the immediate audience.
Having a third party focused on verifying and measuring these specifics will become key. Additionally, measuring quality will enable advertisers to buy quality inventory, differentiating from some of the excess supply in the market-leading to price stability.
The concept of exposure time is becoming important in digital online and people are transferring that to the digital out-of-home space with the primary concern of how long an ad is in view. Third-party verification can help provide detailed reporting on those parameters.
The potential of DOOH is unlimited and is all set to grab increased marketing spends and we’re seeing channel partners, agencies, and brands increasingly working together with verification partners to help measure and verify their plays. This collective collaboration will enable the medium to thrive and grow to its full potential without transparency challenges clouding digital advertising. DOOH is an exciting medium to watch as it continues to integrate its forms of media, connecting with consumers.
It is good news for all of us that the DOOH media channel is heading for a bounce-back in 2021. As programmatic technology becomes more widely available, DOOH will give marketers and agencies more options, more customization, and therefore more control in their campaigns. It’s a refreshing new take on an old medium.
With the growing number of pDOOH campaigns to identify there are five key challenges in adopting pDOOH.
1) Education
As with all new innovations, there is always a level of education required as a means of accelerating the adoption of the new norm amongst key stakeholders, and pDOOH is no acceptation to this.
According to a study conducted by the IAB and PwC 95% of participants interviewed identified education as one of the barriers to the adoption of pDOOH.
Education is required on both the buy-side and the sell-side on brand safety. It needs to explain:
- What are the benefits of pDOOH in comparison to traditional OOH, and how it compares and aligns with other digital mediums?
- The capabilities of pDOOH and how it can bring added value to clients and how attribution is measured.
- How pDOOH is transacted to a one-to-many approach, as well as one-to-one targeting. It also needs to explain the media planning requirements and how this new feature should sit with programmatic buying agencies.
2) Fragmentation
A lack of inventory consolidation in the market across commercially available pDOOH solutions has resulted in a fragmentation of inventory.
This fragmentation across markets has made it difficult for some partners to accurately forecast and plan. Furthermore, not all platforms are programmatically enabled, meaning some buy-side platforms are not able to buy from a single DSP, causing inefficiency.
3) Standardisation
43% of respondents from the IAB and PwC study stated non- standardization as a major barrier to the full adoption of pDOOH.
The lack of standardization of data and inventory within the industry means that a multi-platform buying approach is restrictive at present.
In order for pDOOH buying to increase there needs to be a standardized methodology of both data definition and data collection, which in turn needs to be adopted and implemented by all players within the market.
4) Attribution
Industry recognized attribution is currently lacking across both DOOH and pDOOH
5) Quality and transparency in audience data
On the buy-side, data privacy regulations and their evolution are a concern when it comes to quality and collection methods. Furthermore, media buyers are unclear on the accuracy and methodology of the collection of the underlying data.
Understanding your customer is crucial to creating successful campaigns. Because once you understand them, you have a much better chance of influencing their behavior. But, to really get to grips with their needs, wants, and challenges, you must do your research and in doing so, gather data.
The digital revolution has transformed market research. Interactions between brands and consumers have become more digital, meaning brands have more access to customer data. More data means more opportunities to get to know your customers and understand them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has further driven the shift toward digital customer interaction since more customers are ordering goods and services online due to social distancing regulations.
Companies that can harness this information via the optimum channels have the potential to create some of the most targeted, personal, and effective marketing campaigns ever.
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