Digital out-of-home branches out with programmatic

The emergence of programmatic ad buying is having a big impact on digital out-of-home (DOOH) marketing where a lot of premium inventory is now available for the first time.

That and other ways DOOH is adding to the digital media landscape were the focus of last week’s DPAA Global Summit in New York.

“We doubled down on programmatic, we employed programmatic resources to move [ad] schedules easily without a lot of contracts and a lot of humans from where people were not to where they were,” said DPAA President & CEO Barry Frey. “That became our superpower. And then we made alliances…introducing people to new sources of data, to new sources of representation and scale.”

With the ability for advertisers to integrate DOOH into programmatic omnichannel campaigns, it becomes easier for them to leverage spaces where consumers expect ads, as part of outdoor street landscape that’s featured billboards and bus shelter ads since the early days of advertising.

Given this native positioning, out-of-home might even be more welcome than some TV ads, if consumers pay for adless premium subscriptions instead of the cheaper ad-supported tiers offered by Peacock or, coming soon, Netflix.

“Viewers are going to limit any intrusion by ads into their paid-for services,” said François de Gaspé Beaubien, Chairman & COO of Zoom Media and DPAA Chair.

“As an industry, we’re fast-forwarding into technological maturity with DSPs integrating into the industry, multiple SSPs driving revenue and an unprecedented understanding of audiences and outcomes,” he added.

Why we care. Because DOOH spent the last two years “connecting the pipes” internally by enabling programmatic buying, it’s in a better position to connect and help execute omnichannel campaigns. 

Out-of-home ads in the “real world” don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re seen by consumers who are always, themselves, connected. So out-of-home can act as a bridge to other emerging areas in adtech, including retail media networks and even the metaverse. These areas might not have seemed obviously connected to DOOH, but their presence in the DPAA Summit made sense once the direction of out-of-home was made clearer during the presentations.

As a tongue-in-cheek gesture to this new “blurring reality” between physical and virtual spaces, Barry Frey first appeared in avatar form on giant screens before taking the stage to deliver his keynote in physical form.

Programmatic impact. Digital out-of-home marketplace VIOOH sees the programmatic transformation of DOOH as a driver for new money from ad budgets. A majority of new incremental spend from ad budgets will be coming into DOOH, according to a survey of advertisers they recently fielded.

Where is the money coming from? Not surprisingly, 52% of advertisers said they’ll shift spend  from traditional OOH. Advertisers who see the value in OOH see even more value if they can buy it programmatically. But 37% said they’ll add new budgets specifically for DOOH, and 31% said they’d take DOOH spend out of other digital budgets. Finally, 21% said they’d shift spend from other traditional media.

Cross-channel amplification. Out-of-home agency Kinetic US (owned by WPP) looked at how advertisers plan to leverage DOOH by amplifying it on other channels. The results show a number of dynamic use cases that advertisers are looking to execute as consumers get back outside.

Among U.S. brands, 62% plan to boost DOOH with social media. If consumers are posting photos or other messages relating to their location on a social app where they willingly share their location, then it makes sense to show ads on social that reinforce the impressions that these users see on the street.

For digital video ads, 46% of U.S. brands plan to integrate this channel with DOOH. This could entail reaching digital users when they are close to the DOOH ad, or at a later time, simply to remind them of what they saw earlier.

Finally, 45% of U.S. brands plan to use DOOH with digital audio. Consumers are often listening to audio media while out in the world, creating the opportunity for a very strong complementary set of impressions between what they spot outdoors and what they hear through their ear buds.

Dig deeper: DOOH moves to standardize industry

Retail media. During the pandemic, CVS became a destination for critical testing and immunizations related to Covid-19, introducing the brand to many new customers.

“The experience we provided, the ability to reengage with those folks in telling them the broader story about the organization and what we do has been really important,” said Diego Vaccarezza, VP of enterprise media for CVS.

Being a highly-trusted retailer now puts CVS in the position to communicate with these customers about next best actions that are highly relevant and also respect their privacy and legal rights by complying with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations.

This relationship and trust with customers is why advertisers would want to connect with them through CVS retailer channels. Currently, CVS stores offer audio in-store exposure, but they have yet to develop in-store video signage similar to their competitor, Walgreens. That means there is still a tremendous amount of growth to be gained as Vaccarezza steers the ship he built in-house from scratch over the last six years and going live with the retail media network in 2020.

Digital and offline experiences. At the summit, brand people at Adidas and the retail chain Claire’s outlined their strategies to engage consumers on-site and in-store, while also presenting brand experiences on digital social platforms, as well as in metaverse virtual spaces. Younger consumers – including Gen Z and the even younger Gen Alpha – simply don’t see a clear distinction between a digital and a real-world experience. It’s all experiential to them.

“They really don’t delineate between that anymore,” Adidas VP global marketing Erika Wykes-Sneyd, “so that blurring area of virtual space is what is coming next – with this new wave of the metaverse, which includes everything from augmented reality, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs and so on.”

For business purposes, the attendance at the DPAA Global Summit shows the interest in professionals of all ages who want to get together in real spaces. In 2021, the summit had under roughly 600 attendees, and this was in the fall before the Omicron variant produced a spike in pandemic infections. This year, as an updated booster rolled out, nearly 1,000 advertising professionals came to Chelsea Piers for the DPAA summit.