Data takes the complexity out of managing and marketing your OOH assets. Which means the industry should fast track its adoption of ad management tech – and the process isn’t as difficult as you might think, says Lawrence Hyde.
Having recently toured the halls of ISE 2023, one of my first takeaways was how everything is starting to fall under one DOOH umbrella – be it retail media, digital signage, or digital out of home.
Which begs the question, does the OOH landscape really need to be so complex and how can we make it easier for media buyers to purchase across such an interesting mix of environments and formats?
The second takeaway is that data is a necessity, not a nice to have and all OOH operators are expected to provide data to their end customers. This could be audience data or playback data.
With regards to reporting, media buyers want to know they are reaching the right audiences and be able to measure the impact of the channel. There’s no longer any excuse not to be accountable and have the necessary data to hand.
By its very nature, OOH is a mass broadcast medium, but the sheer flexibility of DOOH is seeing a shift to programmatic buying in some markets. The question is at what cost?
Being able to serve a DOOH advert to a specific target group, followed by another ad which is served as a different target audience walks past, is already part of the sophisticated DOOH offer. This will no doubt lead to longer campaigns to deliver the necessary eyeballs – and all of that takes time to plan and execute particularly if you rely on legacy systems.
Which brings me to my final takeaway. Whilst the industry is evolving, the adoption of available technology and ad network management platforms to accommodate the above mentioned points is not keeping pace.
This is down to the complexity of the tech ecosystem and having a bewildering number of choices, but often it also comes down to a worry about change and disruption.
This is why we often recommend taking a staged approach, by addressing the bottlenecks in your OOH business first, be it AdOps, creating sales proposals, or delivering accurate playout reports.
Automating these tasks first makes a world of difference and will take the day to day complexity out of running your business from the get-go.
To find out more please contact me on Lawrence.h@doohclick.com