Forget everything you thought you knew about out of home

The massive technological leaps we’ve seen in 2020 are about to revolutionise media into the future. Here, Arnaud Calonne, New Zealand sales director at Verizon Media, shares his thoughts on why the new programmatic capability for Digital Out of Home is set to be a milestone for the industry.

This year’s events have changed many things in the media industry, with spends reallocated as consumers spent more time indoors under lockdowns and on digital services. While many of these changes will remain, there are a couple of sectors I believe will come roaring back in 2021.

One of the hardest hit sectors was the out of home industry. In H2 of 2020 alone the industry saw a 76% year-on-year revenue fall, according to The Out of Home Media Association Aotearoa (OOHMAA). It’s understandable, with people unable to go out, what marketer is going to spend big on ads fewer people will see?

But as spring turns to summer, we’re starting to see more people get outdoors, and with vaccines now on the horizon we’ll start to see more activity. And while you may not have been paying attention to OOH media, there have been some technical advances that have moved it from a ‘traditional’ media buy to a new part of the digital marketing armoury – programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH).

Outdoor media has always been a great brand-building platform, and this advance makes it an even more compelling buy. Let me explain why.

Targeting the right people at the right time

New location-based technologies can indicate when consumers have been to a specific point of interest and where defined audience clusters have a higher propensity to be at any one time. This means pDOOH ads can be delivered in hyper-targeted real time, a precision marketer’s dream.

Programmatic buying of DOOH allows brands and agencies to control their spend, respond instantly to lockdowns – whether regional or national – and focus on times of the day that get more reach.

In a nutshell, it cuts wastage dramatically.

Closing the loop

Getting the right message in front of the right customer has always been crucial – and in a programmatic world it’s very achievable. This advance means you can now target customers across digital signs as they do their shopping, their mobiles when they eat lunch, and then show up in the connected TV show they watch that night.

Players like Val Morgan Outdoor (VMO) and Lumo Digital Outdoor are already using this sophisticated technology in New Zealand, enabling marketers to understand in real-time the audience available in front of a screen down to the gender, age, and dwell time.

Add into that traffic stats, temperature variables and time of day and there’s a powerful set of assets to help sway with your messaging. Who doesn’t want to buy an ice cream when it’s 30 degrees?

Live in action

All of this has the potential to revolutionise the OOH media industry. A lot of new opportunities have already sprouted up internationally. For example, German food delivery company Foodora used programmatic DOOH to deliver relevant messaging at lunch and around dinnertime.

Customers were prompted to go for a nice walk to pick up their food if it was sunny, and to treat themselves to delivery when it was raining.

Restaurants suggested were different depending on location, and all of this was accomplished without any additional input from Foodora once the campaign had been set up.

Marketers have more control than ever before to select, in real-time, the perfect location, screen size, and moment to reach their target audiences.

Locally, we’ve already seen marketers take up this technology. Stanley St’s recent campaign for Briscoes for example wasn’t just a typical digital out of home (DOOH) campaign, it was New Zealand’s very first programmatic DOOH experience.

As more marketers adopt this technology, they will be able to have a single view of the customer journey across all channels allowing for seamless planning, execution, and reporting across display, video, native, and DOOH in one centralised platform.

It’s important for marketers to expand their programmatic offerings to keep up with competitors and truly be able to offer their clients audience measurement capabilities like no other.

The post Forget everything you thought you knew about out of home appeared first on stoppress.co.nz.

stoppress.co.nz