digital out of home
Darwinesque competition has never
been more rife. Hundreds of digital
agencies and ad tech companies vie
for a seat at the table or will die trying
with the latter becoming increasingly
likely. Some digital players set their
sights on traditional channels, such as
out of home advertising, as a frontier
not yet enveloped by the programmatic
titans . On the other side of that looking
glass, as traditional channels embrace
digital – for outdoor adv ertising through
the proliferation of digital screens and
distribution platforms – incumbents
grapple to understand what the digital
future looks like, and what role they’ll
play when it finally arrives.
Media owners in the outdoor space
are investing heavily in digitising their
screen inventory, with recent market
data highlighting the continued rise of
digital revenues to 42% of the overall
market spend. What’s striking is that only
2.5%, or around 10,000 digital outdoor
screens exist in the UK. That’s quite a
statistic. Understandably the mindset of
media owners has been that if we can
create more digital screens we can plug
that inventory into the digital advertising
ecosystem and take share from Google
and Facebook, where spend is roughly
ten times greater than the total spend in
the outdoor market.
While this may be compelling, it might
not be where the biggest opportunity
lies. More beneficial would be to pay
closer attention to a wider collision
course unfolding between advertising,
content and commerce, with customer
data playing the most important role. In
this wider consolidation, as brands adopt
technology to funnel more and more
of their marketing activity towards real
time decisioning of customer data, out of
home can transcend display advertising
and bridge the gap between ‘e-tail’ and
‘retail’. It’s worth noting here that despite
the growth of e-commerce, close to 90%
of all retail activity in the US last year
happened offline.
Out of home for retail
It goes without saying that retailers
and e-tailers will rely more on data to
understand and make informed real
time decisions on customer behaviour.
Advancements in the industry will enable
retailers to add more tools in the arsenal
of activating consumer data. Here's what
the future may hold:
Out of home media decisioning
Remaining on the data theme, trading
platforms increasingly enable brands
to utilise their first party sales and CRM
data and/or third party consumer data
that’s owned by programmatic and
data management platforms. This is to
determine when and where to buy out
of home inventory. Also, as out of home
trading platforms rapidly evolve, it will be
possible to test campaigns, learn from
the data, measure uplift and re-optimise
campaigns in real time – an approach
that's already prevalent in digital
advertising strategies.
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