Views from the industry: DOOH advertising

What do you think is driving DOOH growth?

With digital out of home having grown by 11% year on year and now delivering over 1 billion impacts each week, the DOOH market offers unprecedented opportunities for advertisers in terms of reach, flexible planning as well as creativity.

DOOH operates in a highly brand safe and accountable environment that doesn’t have some of the same challenges as other forms of online advertising. Ad blocking, brand safety and viewability aren’t concerns when you know the location of the ad and can use route data to determine viewable audiences.

DOOH also benefits from being unshackled from the two-week in-charge model. Buyers can activate flexibly on shorter lead times, in the same way as other digital channels. When combined with the creativity of dynamic campaigns that can react to real-life events and adapt their content using various external and first-party data, this becomes an exciting opportunity for progressive marketers to get their creative messages to audiences at scale.

Ben Price, Sales Operations Director, Clear Channel

What creative opportunities does DOOH offer advertisers?

Digital OOH is a unique canvas that enables creative to be tactical and to evolve over the course of a campaign, achieving improved audience engagement. Add to this the ability to be contextual, responsive and data-driven, and it is easy to see why digital OOH is starting to play an important part in the digital conversation.

It is a connected medium, campaigns can adapt and respond to local conditions, real-world events, traffic flow and social media trends. Digital OOH should be utilised as a real-time marketing platform, to react and promote the right messages, to the right audience at the right time.

Lisa Portman, Head of Marketing, QDOT

Why is DOOH unique for advertisers?

OOH is in growth mode, driven by digital, and has the potential to grow even further and faster. Similar to research we at VIOOH carried out earlier this year on the future of digital OOH, this report from the IAB highlights that there is a job to be done around educating the market on the benefits of the medium.

That said, it’s an exciting time for OOH. It is now so versatile, continuing to be both a high impact medium for awareness building as well as delivering activated, shorter term campaigns based on conditional triggers. It really is the bridge between online and offline. And as a result, it is now easier to align marketing strategies across digital channels to deliver unique brand experiences and meaningful outcomes for advertisers.

Jean-Christophe Conti, CEO, VIOOH

Why are you excited about automation in DOOH?

It’s fair to say that automation is probably considered one of the less exciting tech shifts in outdoor as we move towards a programmatic future, but it’s fundamental for a couple of reasons. As screens digitise and we move away from putting content up in two week blocks – towards trading audience increments – the number of transactions is growing exponentially. That’s great, but each of those transactions is smaller in size, so the only way that volume can be handled profitably is through automation of buying and selling.

Related to this, if the market is going to continue to grow it needs new advertisers. Currently there is little SME participation in the market. If the market wants to compete for SME budget it needs to be easy and cost effective to buy at small ticket sizes, as it is in other digital channels. That’s where automation is critical.

Aidan Neill, Co-Founder & CEO, Bitposter

What will encourage more adoption of DOOH?

It’s encouraging to see from IAB UK’s research that around a third of respondents stated that they expected to increase their DOOH spend in the coming year. However, for DOOH to act as a standalone offering, its reach needs to continue to grow - especially outside of the top 10 cities. In order to support and accelerate this growth, a number of industry-wide steps are necessary:

• Improving use of dynamic copy. It is more effective than static imagery, but many advertisers aren’t taking advantage of it yet

• Better understanding of where DOOH fits into the wider media mix alongside traditional OOH, full-motion video, VOD, social and digital display

• Better standardisation across the industry – how it’s sold, spot lengths, category exclusivity and so on

• Finally, more case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of DOOH at driving results against the full range of marketing objectives 

Nicole Lonsdale, Chief Strategy Officer, Kinetic Worldwide

Find out more about our YouGov DOOH survey here.