What trends are driving the increased interest around digital out of home (OOH) at the moment? How is programmatic buying contributing to that growth and where does programmatic OOH fit into an omnichannel marketing strategy?
These were among the questions posed to a gathering of industry experts during this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, hosted by New Digital Age (NDA) in association with VIOOH. The roundtable discussion was chaired by New Digital Age’s Editor Justin Pearse, where he was joined by: Oliver Saunders, Global Head of Addressable Solutions at Wavemaker; Emma Withington, Chief Planning Officer, MG OMD; Ben Carter, Global Chief Customer & Marketing Officer, Carwow; Ollie Shayer, Omni-Media Director, Boots UK; Michelle Sarpong, Commercial Lead, the7stars; James Shoreland, CEO, VCCP Media; and Jem Djemal, Global New Business Lead, VIOOH.
Wavemaker’s Saunders spoke of how OOH had become “a romantic heritage format for the ad industry” before digital screens and programmatic buying breathed new life into the channel.
“Programmatic OOH is having the secondary effect of enabling an omnichannel approach in a way that wasn’t the case before. The rebirth of the QR code is also making OOH much more of a performance channel.”
Saunders believes that “using location as context has suddenly become the way to deliver relevance in a post-cookie world” but argued that many brands and their agencies aren’t yet ready to make the mental shift required.
“Programmatic OOH is obviously a medium that lends itself to ‘time and place’, but agencies don’t usually think about it until the ‘activation’ stage of a media campaign, rather than the ‘ideation’ stage. Programmatic OOH is undoubtedly a powerful format but it takes a brave brand and a sophisticated set of providers, willing to work together, to get it right.”
Withington of MD OMD agreed that, to date, brands and agencies have been “a little slow” to leverage the full range of capabilities of programmatic OOH as a format.
“Being able to add OOH to the omnichannel mix and, for example, frequency cap across a variety of channels and stitch a story together for customers is amazing. In programmatic OOH, we now have a mid-funnel layer where we can drive consideration in a much more manageable, connected way than before. Programmatic buying is also making OOH accessible to lots of businesses that couldn’t have considered it previously.”
Withington pointed out how, from a consumer perspective, there’s a bigger expectation of ‘intelligent screens’ generally in our lives. “We’ve become so familiar with the data we can access via our smartphone screens and our ‘connected’ TVs that there’s a growing expectation of ‘street furniture’ to provide the same kind of interactivity.
“The message being delivered is also expected to be relevant and have some sort of benefit, which is a big challenge. With so many potential contextual signals and data sets available to inform your campaigns, how do you determine which are the most powerful?”
Brand perspectives
Carter commented: “For a brand like Carwow, the exciting part of programmatic OOH is the variety of data signals you can tap into. Obviously, people don’t buy a new car every week, so we’re looking for market signals wherever we can find them and the big OOH players have become a lot better at getting the right data partnerships in place.
“We consider ourselves a ‘brave’ brand, but we’re taking baby steps with programmatic OOH. We have a marketing team of 25 people, so we’re on a journey with how we’re leveraging digital OOH, but we are absolutely aware of the new options available to us.”
Carter added that, as the skillsets of specialist marketers continue to converge, brand marketing teams will need to adapt and evolve to think in a more omnichannel and media-neutral way.
Discussing Boots’ own journey with digital and programmatic OOH, Shayer pointed out that until recently, OOH was often the last channel to be considered from a creative perspective.
“We’ve gotten to the point now where you need to apply the same kind of creative logic to OOH as you would to a traditional digital environment. That’s a fundamental shift in thinking.
“We’ve found that, in some cases, taking creative ideas developed originally for the social space and adapting them for programmatic OOH can deliver better results for us than targeting by ‘closest proximity’. By utilising the data sets available to us and creating exclusion groups, we’re able to measure the sales lift on featured products very effectively.”
Too often, said Shayer, marketing teams see the launch of an ad campaign as an end result in itself: “The great thing about programmatic OOH is the opportunity it gives you to learn and iterate; to adjust your creative and make things better.”
The new OOH
Sarpong of the7stars believes that, as much as clients are looking to drive ROI with their OOH media investments, they’re also looking to improve their share of voice on social media.
“Brands want to go viral for the right reasons and great OOH advertising is something that people like to share on social media. A standout OOH campaign can often pick up organic press coverage too.
“Print publishers have become very good at telling advertisers what does and doesn’t work in their various titles. I think OOH vendors need to do the same in terms of helping advertisers to better understand the full capabilities of programmatic OOH and advising clients on what can work well in that setting. That same need for support is also driving more advertisers towards omnichannel DSPs, where the process of buying DOOH programmatically is usually simplified to some extent.”
Given the fragmentation of the media marketplace, outdoor advertising is one of the few remaining media channels capable of “really grabbing your attention and being memorable” according to Shoreland of VCCP Media.
“The long lead times associated with traditional OOH held the channel back in the past, as it was impossible to optimise an OOH campaign mid-flight. Programmatic digital OOH has changed all that, but getting the most from the opportunity requires media planners and creatives to work together. It’s a fundamental problem for our industry that we have a whole generation of media planners and media buyers who have never worked with creatives before.”
The market for OOH is in the middle of “a big transition” at the moment, said Djemal of leading premium global digital OOH supply side platform VIOOH.
“Media owners are now making more outdoor assets available, enabling not only better supply but also onboarding exciting spectacular screens which unlock creative potential. These large format screens really drive home the high-impact, impressive nature of OOH, particularly when combined with new creative developments such as attention-grabbing Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) or 3D, which we are starting to see more of.
Around 80% of the top 30 advertisers we work with are now buying OOH via omnichannel DSPs which indicates it’s increasingly being considered as part of the mix and, typically, where we see clients using emerging programmatic channels like CTV, programmatic digital OOH seems to be the natural evolution and next step.
“As an international SSP, we’re working in close to 30 different countries and while each has its own particular quirks to consider, it poses a fantastic opportunity to see more global brands running co-ordinated multi-market campaigns enabled through programmatic. We’re working with our agency partners, delivering joint education sessions and workshops, and we’re doing the same with the omnichannel DSPs we work with as well. Education is going to be the way forward because there are definitely different requirements and skills required in leveraging programmatic OOH to its full potential.”
Part two of this report will be published on Monday.
