Choose audience over sites with DOOH

Digital out of home’s transition to audience-led selling provides opportunities for media owners says Natalia Escribano, CCO at VIOOH

Real-time consumer data has been a buzzword in display advertising for years.

Adapting campaigns based on customer responses and audience data insights is well established in the fast-paced digitally savvy advertising industry.

Except when it comes to out of home (OOH) advertising. While it may have lagged behind in the digital transformation race for a while, digital out of home (DOOH) has been making up for lost time, and brands are starting to take notice.

eMarketer expects DOOH ad spending to increase from $2.72 billion in 2020 to $3.84 billion in 2023. According to ECI Media Management, it is also predicted to experience the biggest Covid-19 recovery and bounce back strongly in the UK this year.

DOOH advertising can now track consumer behaviour, via first and third party data, including geography, postcode and post-exposure metrics such as footfall and in-store or online purchases.

In fact, an audience-led, programmatic selling strategy can target people with a specific purchase intent, income, age or other factors, which allows a campaign to be triggered or adapted in near real-time.

So, why is this interesting? In DOOH, audience-led selling can increase the effectiveness of campaigns for advertisers and deliver a clear value-led proposition to digital buyers, which in turn builds greater revenue opportunities for media owners.

In a recent campaign with Sony Playstation Belgium for its latest game release, Ghost of Tsushima (pictured), it wanted to build a campaign that directly targeted console gamers to raise awareness and drive sales.

Through the use of smart programmatic OOH planning, we worked together with partners OutSight, Outmoove and AdSquare to use mobile segments to target audiences programmatically.

Over 250,000 mobile IDs were identified that segmented users as console gamers, which were then matched to specific JCDecaux DOOH screens the campaign was triggered to run on, when the target audience (and their mobile) were in close proximity.

This audience-led approach meant that the campaign had a high hit-rate of specific, relevant, and targeted audiences. Four weeks after launch, Sony Playstation Belgium reached 66% of its full year sales objective for the game.

There are different ways that inventory is currently sold.

Selling by environment and format means the campaign is displayed around the audience and screens. For example, for eight D6 posters in a railway station campaign, results can be up to 15% Share of Time (SoT), with 1.9M impressions.

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Conversely, with more screens but less SoT all in one environment, for example with 24 D6 posters in a railway station, results change to 5% SoT with 1.8M impressions. Similar results can be achieved, using limited and specific inventory.

Alternatively, a campaign could cover a wider geographical region, with more screens all fitted to the target audiences and across all environments.

For example, 12 D6 posters across environments in a city centre, could deliver up to 10% SoT with 1.9M impressions. In this example, media owners and advertisers benefit from reaching more of their target audience with the wider geographical spread, as well as having access to more inventory due to the number of screens used in combination with SoT. This is an audience-led selling approach.

Audience-led selling is a new approach for DOOH and there are two main benefits to consider: driving revenue opportunities and incremental revenue, and secondly, improved response rates.

Higher sell-through rates across more screens helps to promote more impressions on a wider selection of screens based on the audience.

It limits frame picking and proximity-only campaigns, and simplifies programmatic OOH media buying. This gives buyers the opportunity to scope out target audiences and then serve the creative to match the audiences at specific screens.

For media owners, selling by audience delivers the option to build premium packages for key audiences and increase competition between screens, optimising yield.

More impressions can be sold across more screens, and screens not often considered can be included in campaigns if they deliver the right audience. It also brings media buyers better and more targeted access, matching the way they buy media across other digital campaigns, which ultimately helps to drive more demand.

I’m personally very passionate about this topic. In my view, it is the only way forward for the media owners to increase the value of their inventory and speak a common language with digital buyers. Audience-led selling also helps brands better engage with consumers as many research studies have shown.

To truly grow OOH revenue and market share, OOH must continue to expand into digital buyers and programmatic budgets.

These buyers are well versed in buying by audience and trading programmatically, so to encourage ad spend, media owners need to set up their campaigns to hit targets based on audiences and data.

By focusing on the audience instead of the environment, the process is simplified and ensures that OOH is future proofed.

People are rarely static and are found in more places than just 100m away from the store you want them to visit or a major train station. Buying the audience that best fits your campaign objectives, rather than a set of panels deemed to be in the best locations, is the new normal for DOOH.

Don’t get left behind…