Welcome back to our DOOH News for September 2019. This month we’ve been exploring Gen Z’s feelings on OOH, we produced a fantastic dynamic campaign for jetBlue and we went behind the scenes of digital OOH production. Enjoy!

This month… we ‘Escaped the Cape’ with jetBlue! ✈️

jetBlue airlines targeted vacationers driving to Cape Cod with this roadside digital OOH campaign. The dynamic campaign encouraged vacationers to explore different vacation destinations with similar travel times.

In other news…

The busiest quarter of the year is just getting started! Here are our top tips on how to prepare your digital OOH for the busiest period in retail.

Ever wanted to see behind the scenes at Grand Visual? Adam our producer gives us a peek into the life of digital OOH production.

With our latest promo for Google, we highlighted the data triggers used to ‘Make the Most of Summer!’

For this month’s insights, we discussed how food & beverage brands can connect with consumers through digital OOH.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our DOOH News for September 2019. If you would like to start receiving our monthly DOOH Newsletters in your mailbox, then please sign up here.

This first appeared in ExchangeWire on 30th October 2018

Dan Dawson, Chief Creative Technology Officer at Grand Visual, explains how blockchain technology could transform digital OOH – but we need to crack programmatic first.

We’ve taken an active role in defining how it might affect Digital OOH media specifically. Through our work with the Digital Future Council, a think tank of clients, industry leaders, and technologists, bridging the gap between media, advertising, and technology, and here’s what we found out about the transformative role that Blockchain technology could play across the Digital OOH media landscape.

What is Blockchain?

To start at the beginning, in simple terms, Blockchain is a type of digital ledger or ‘tally’ of transactions. The word ‘tally’ actually derives from Old French ‘taille’ meaning a “notch in a piece of wood signifying a debt”. Tally sticks would be split through the middle of the notches – with one retained by the creditor and the other by the debtor as an equal record of a transaction. Blockchain effectively works the same way, just multiple times over. A tally of batches of transactions stored in a database known as blocks (hence the term blockchain).So it’s just a database then?

So it’s just a database then?

The main differentiator for blockchain versus a regular database are the specific rules about how to put data into the blockchain.

1. Data cannot conflict with some other data that’s already in there.
2. It’s append-only and the data itself is cryptographically signed and locked to an owner.
3. It’s replicable and available to be seen.
4. Everyone agrees on what the rules of the database are without a central party, making it decentralised.

These points have made Blockchain technology very attractive to businesses, as there is no single point of failure. It’s also the reason cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin exist – not regulated by a single government or state, owned by the people who invest within an agreed set of rules. It’s also why I can see a future for Blockchain implementation across the media world, including Digital OOH.

Blockchain & Digital OOH

Media Agency Truth launched last year, the first of a new breed of media agencies utilising blockchain smart contract technology to provide 100% transparency for clients. It’s clear to see that the transparency and security that the Blockchain can offer as part of a media buy could help brands seeking value from their suppliers and agencies.

But where do we expect to really see changes, with DOOH in mind?

Data Management: In the DOOH space we are rich in data. We have the benefit of screens (in general) not moving; and therefore we are able to build an awesome data picture of the location, and the changeable conditions and audiences. Moving this all into the blockchain could effectively mean smarter planning, targeting, buying, execution, distribution, and measurement across DOOH screens.

Audience Targeting: Increased data sharing through the blockchain will fuel omnichannel and omni-screen campaigns with much smarter cross-platform audience planning. With more electronic devices in everyone’s pockets, connected, cross-platform digital platforms campaigns will become a programmatic reality.

Media buying: With the above two points in place, and with media owner tech stacks sitting with the same protocols, we see a clear rationale for the media buying of DOOH to be more automated, smarter, and more transparent using blockchain technology. The use of smart contracts between parties makes the whole integration process seem very appealing for most parties.

Content distribution: For those of us in the content creation and distribution world, it could be even more important. If a campaign is bought in this way, it really should be delivered and reported on with the same level of transparency.

Playback reporting: The ability for brand managers to see real-time, independent third-party verification of campaign play out is essential. The industry needs to provide this level of transparency and accountability for the programmatic future of digital OOH.

What now?

No doubt it’s going to be tough to implement blockchain technology across the digital OOH landscape. It could be said that the things that make blockchain so appealing to the media world are the same things that will impede its uptake. Development of this technology is inherently slow, there are many moving parts, it relies on users, protocols and, coupled with that, the maintenance of such systems does not come cheap.

But, it will certainly get easier. Great strides already being made by the major OOH media owners to get the ecosystem working programmatically are a huge first step. Media Protocol, another founding member of the Digital Future Council, is looking to create the protocol from which everyone works. So, just as we use FTP for File Transfers or HTTP for Hypertext Transfer for websites, everyone in the media industry could use the same protocol, an important step that will make it a whole lot easier to implement at each step of the process.

What next?

Imagine a brand manager who is able to interrogate the blockchain containing their campaign information, to see ALL media buys, content distribution, ALL playout reports, and tracking, from across the entire digital supply chain. That is truly powerful and unifies the currently fragmented digital advertising space.

We’re excited by the prospect, but let’s not forget to take it one step at a time. Programmatic first, blockchain second. Arguably, the leap to blockchain should be easier after the shift to programmatic DOOH. However, the industry will have to adopt blockchain-based solutions en masse for them to be useful and effective; and there are plenty of players in the DOOH ecosystem who may not feel as incentivised as others to make this dream a reality.

This piece was first published by The Huffington Post on 05/01/2017. 

The once humble billboard, now a connected powerhouse, looks set to play a key role in the future of smart city infrastructure. The digitisation of the Out of Home media landscape continues apace and provides an important entry point for reaching hyper-connected urban audiences with real-time news and information, alongside smart, contextual, data-driven advertising.

For advertisers, never before has there been so much opportunity to target on-the-go audiences. The ubiquity of full-motion Digital Out of Home (DOOH) screens in cities around the world, combined with rocketing smartphone penetration, wifi provision, and a growing tech-savvy OOH audience, all provide a huge amount of data to inform outdoor creative. Advertisers should be looking at OOH through a new strategic lens.

In fact, we can harness a vast range of data to contextualise OOH copy. There’s location data, and 3rd party data such as weather, social, transit, and news, plus brand owned data including pricing, stock levels, and retail stores. Through these layers of data, we can exploit the ‘Context Effect’ – providing dynamic, data-driven and locally relevant information throughout the customer journey – powerful.

This year there has been some promising signs that the creative mode is moving in the right direction. The datasets have expanded beyond the pure daypart and weather activations that informed DOOH creative in 2015. Campaigns utilising sports data or social media triggers (trends, polls, competitions, direct interaction) have been particularly prevalent, but there has also been cinema listings, traffic reports, pollution levels, travel times, BARB data, and car recognition technology used to inform DOOH creative.

Notable examples from this year include the NSW Cancer Institute using real-time UV levels to deliver sun-safe messages in Australia, Amazon’s people-powered DOOH activity for Catastrophe in the US, which used live twitter polls to trigger themed trailers based on audience preference.

In the UK, the charity Missing People used live registration statistics from its Child Rescue Alert campaign, alongside location and travel data, to deliver real-time, geo-targeted messages. Google’s long-term holding at Old Street roundabout continues to deliver real-time locally relevant information about traffic conditions, weather, nearest cafes, as well as being a living, breathing noticeboard for the East London community.

However, the reality is, we might all be talking about it, but when it comes to harnessing the power of data in the DOOH environment, good examples are still relatively light on the ground. Most campaigns remain one-dimensional, few have leveraged brand owned data or used different datasets to target different touch points during the customer journey. There is definite room for growth here. DOOH could be doing so much more.

The DOOH platform can automate delivery, prioritising advertising which matches pre-set conditions such as time, weather and consumer mindset. For a soft drinks portfolio – this could mean pushing hydrating iced tea on a hot summer’s day, fresh juice and caffeinated drinks during the morning commute, isotonic drinks on gym screens, and details of mixers and cocktails for those heading home after a long day in the office.

Targeting efficiency should also be brought into brand messages as well as media placements, whether that’s tapping into major events, sports tournaments, or topics trending on Twitter. Creative can also target audience segments and mindsets – targeting mums with coffee brands and local cafes during the morning, lunch deals targeting office workers based on the weather, such as soup for cold days, followed by drinks deals available at club nights in the evenings.

Given the serious amount of data available to contextualise copy, it seems strange that DOOH is still lagging behind online in its use of data. The main components of delivering a successful data-informed campaign include; shared ambition, clean, accessible, real-time data, and ad-tech systems to process and deliver copy based on conditions.

The ambition to be more tactical, more relevant and more effective is a given for any brand. Plus, the impressive ROI studies that are starting to amass for data-driven, contextual OOH campaigns makes it a no-brainer. The systems to analyse, manage and deliver real-time data-driven campaigns are already in place with ad-tech platforms such as OpenLoop.

So, that leaves data, and one of the key challenges for 2017 will be finding clean data sources that are accessible in real-time. Data moves extremely fast and a lot of cities are now looking at all the data that gets produced by various systems and how the data is captured. This goes for brands too, as they look to be more strategic in their customer engagement and targeting ability, data streams will become more and more important going forward.

DOOH advertising is in rude health. It cannot be muted, blocked or skipped and provides important touchpoints during the customer journey right up to the point of purchase. The proliferation of devices and data means that advertising messages can now be targeted, tactical and relevant throughout the day. This year has shown some promising signs that the sector is waking up to the opportunity, and we are excited to see where data leads us creatively in 2017.