Programmatic and Digital Out-of-Home – An Unbeatable Combination

The ability of media to adopt valuable tools that better track and measure audiences continues to expand and evolve. For Barry Frey, President and CEO of the DPAA, it is the rollout of programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) that has served to catapult that advertising form to new heights. “As we have built and led the programmatic discussion and evolution in DOOH for many years now, it is invigorating to see that Programmatic DOOH has emerged as the ‘superpower of OOH advertising’.  From the first days of the pandemic, programmatic trading demonstrated the needed agility and flexibility of the DOOH medium,” he stated.

With Intersection, an out-of-home company with a footprint in 18 cities, the advancement of programmatic is proving to be a valuable asset to help advertisers reach and leverage target audiences as well as enable higher quality attribution. Sheri Ham, Intersection’s Vice President of Programmatic Partnerships and Sales, describes her street traffic company as being in the sweet spot of out-of-home and programmatic. “We compete with all of out-of-home,” noted Ham, “And our advantage is that we have the ability to reach audiences, help brands target their audience, provide data driven solutions and offer measurement tools to help them understand their business outcomes,” all within a programmatic framework that, “provides the brand the opportunity to reach their audiences at the right time in the right physical spaces,” across 6,000 screens.

Impact of the Pandemic on OOH Programmatic

As we have seen the pandemic greatly impacted human behavior and changing the landscape for much of media. “The industry was able to pause, push and easily move schedules to where desired audiences existed during Covid and now that people are coming back out of home again, the dynamic capabilities to target and indicate attribution are driving OOH advertising to larger portions of the Omnichannel media mix.  Programmatic is driving digital, mobile, video location and other budgets to OOH on a global basis,” Frey explained.

For Ham, even though consumers sheltered in place, the pandemic actually accelerated current programmatic trends in out-of-home. “Prior to the pandemic the foundation was really in place,” she began and then added, “but the pandemic accelerated programmatic largely in part to the flexibility that programmatic affords and the advancements across-the-board, campaign planning, execution and measurement.”

There is also a new advertising mindset in programmatic. Ham noted that, “What we've seen most recently coming out of the pandemic and post Covid is that agencies have had shorter planning cycles so they are turning to the flexibility of programmatic to help them in their planning efforts and to get campaigns activated in a shorter timeframe than they've had in the past.” And now even the landscape is shifting. “We're coming to post pandemic and starting to see more people spend time in physical spaces,” she added.

Overcoming Obstacles

Out-of-home has had its share of skeptics. “There's a perception that there is a lack of ROI in the out-of-home channel,” she posited. “The reality is that there have been improvements across the board for measurement and attribution and that those tools and solutions are now available to brands to kind of measure their brand lift to look at the engagement from users across the channel to have the ability to really target those users on online. This has helped move out of home from the top of the funnel.”

Campaign Success

When asked to cite an example of a successful Intersection campaign, Ham shared a national campaign for a Pharma brand which leveraged audience targeting, retargeting and a brand lift study. “We used Neustar audience data to identify the clients target audience and the corresponding screens that over index against that audience. We deployed the campaign nationally and then retargeted the users who  were exposed to the brand messaging across Intersection screens nationwide and then retargeted those users online,” she explained. The result was that the campaign saw an increase in performance for both VCR (video completion rate) and CTR (click through rate) for users that were retargeted following the out-of-home exposure versus only those that were exposed online. In addition, “We also included a brand lift study for that campaign and 77% of the respondents said that they liked the Ad or had a better brand opinion following the exposure to the Ad,” she noted.

The Future of Programmatic Out-Of-Home

“eMarketer has been charting the aggressive programmatic DOOH growth in the US and projects 2021 at $435M almost doubling previous years,” noted Frey who added, “Many in the industry believe the figure will far surpass these estimates.   Programmatic DOOH was a huge part of our Summit this year with all of the major SSPs, DSPs and related platforms engaging in serious and productive dialogue.”

Ham, too, is very optimistic about the future of programmatic DOOH and Intersection. “We will continue to see expansion across the channel, there will be more tools available to the buyers for more attention on reaching target audiences. We make sure that they get the right user at the right time through the premium real estate that out-of-home provides,” she asserted.

She predicted that, for the industry, “The measurement tools will continue to advance over the next few years and we will also see continued expansion and collaboration between out-of-home and digital teams. There's an exciting opportunity for TV and video budgets to shift as the industry continues to build out mixed model attribution and measurement tools.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler