Mo Moubayed is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Veridooh, provider of Independent Verification for OOH. Having successfully helped bring Independent OOH verification into the mainstream in Australia, Mo is expanding Veridooh’s mission to make OOH a more automated, trusted and efficient channel across the world. He is based between London and New York.
Who is your digital hero?
Nick Parker, our incredible Global President here at Veridooh and the Former Global COO of Kinetic Worldwide within the GroupM network.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
When people think of digital and digital media, their minds immediately go to online advertising, search and social. But that’s completely overlooking the complete digital transformation that Out of Home has gone through in the last 10 years. Today, revenue from digital OOH is now over 65% in the UK, and even higher in other countries like Australia.
Nick Parker is a frontline veteran in this transformation! Through it all he has been a consistent advocate for a revitalised OOH industry, always pushing for the industry to embrace ‘change as good’ with transparency and accountability front and centre.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
For the bulk of the 21st Century, innovation in online advertising has driven the marketing agenda. We’re finally starting to see that swing the other way, as the significant tech and software innovations in OOH are now leading the media industry. The steady increase of the digitisation of panels from paper to digital screens, ways of buying like programmatic and the proliferation of measurement, tracking and verification tools.
Nick has played an outsized role in bringing this ecosystem together. His passion for innovation is intoxicating, and his advocacy for game-changing technologies such as Veridooh is humbling. He has consistently backed what is right for the industry, not just what’s easy. A lot of people talk a big game but very few have the clear vision to push what is right and have the battle scars to prove it!
What’s the biggest challenge in digital we need another hero to solve?
Definitely how we can better integrate different media to create truly integrated, omnichannel media experiences. We spend a lot of time talking with advertisers and agencies, and what’s clear is that their base level expectations of how media works together is changing. We’ve come a long way from just using TV and OOH for brand and digital and direct for conversion – the challenge now is to use smart data and media planning to create a complete brand experience from one channel to another.
In this regard Digital OOH is shaping up as a huge driver of innovation, and programmatic DOOH in particular. For example, we recently announced a global partnership with Hivestack by Perion, who are bringing more intelligence and data to the omnichannel media planning process. All the core elements are there, now we just need the digital heroes to connect the dots and bring everything together.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
Here at Veridooh, we’re building something that has never been built before: a truly independent, digital and data-driven verification platform for OOH media. There’s no blueprint for launching this, and we’re truly a 0 to 1 company in that sense.
I’m immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished to bring independent verification into the mainstream. People said that we were mad for launching an OOH ad tech company in the middle of a global stay at home order.
And they were right. But we somehow managed to do it, growing sustainably and intelligently in the process, managing to avoid the big rounds of cuts and redundancies that other companies have had to go through. We’ve come out the other side more focuse
