Lets get practical about programmatic OoH

The recent 2020 ‘State of the Nation’ report via the digital out of home marketplace, ViOOH, suggests that despite the fanfare attached to programmatic outdoor media, that growth is forecast to be only marginal in 2021. This despite the fact COVID-19 has placed a premium on flexibility and outcomes-based media investment, which are at the heart of the programmatic promise.

The questions that have been in evidence for the last decade remain: what are the blockers to success, are they solvable and, most importantly, are the problems being solved considered critical problems for marketers?

DPAA estimates put programmatic outdoor spend at between $100-200m globally (2020). Not insignificant, but that’s less than 0.5% of all outdoor spend. The majority of this spend is in the US, where there is more ‘placed based’ advertising (i.e. closer to point of sale) where immediacy is relevant to sales activation. The growth rates of programmatic outdoor are impressive (25%+ p.a.) but to achieve real scale, as the VIOOH report highlights, there is lots to be done.

Albert Einstein once said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” In a similar vein David Ogilvy famously coined the phrase “give me the freedom of a tight brief”.

A lot of technology investment falls down on the basis of never having truly defined the challenge that it proposes to overcome. Often there is self-delusion, and currently there is large availability of funding to add fuel to many of those delusions. As a former economics teacher of mine used to say, “there may be a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap”?

The programmatic promise that sits at the heart of many of the largest companies that have ever existed (Google, Facebook, Twitter & increasingly Amazon) is the idea of a perfect return on investment model for media spend to sales. I put £1 in and I achieve £3 of sales. With that completed loop a chief financial officer can turn media from a cost (liability) into an asset – and by consequence there is potentially unlimited funding to channel into that media investment.

The VIOOH report seemingly criticised “a lack of education among agency and advertiser executives, particularly among more senior marketers”. If that was a criticism as opposed to an observation it is a dangerous one. The real question that the industry should grasp is: does programmatic out of home solve problems for marketers that cannot already be solved in a cheaper and more efficient way elsewhere?

If out of home chooses to compete with other channels on ‘performance’ metrics, such as customer acquisition cost and sales ROI, currently other media channels, both ATL and BTL, are better, cheaper and can rely on more technology and data to support and assist.

That is not to say, given time, out of home will not be able to compete as a performance channel, but realistically that is not the case today.

Currently programmatic out of home is a useful tool, one that is developing and that will be a key part of the marketing mix over time. It is not a ‘killer app’ as it stands and, despite more being written about it than broadcast out of home, the ongoing killer application and what makes out of home unique is the latter.

The real unique selling point out of home medium delivers is the sheer breadth of reach (only rivalled by TV) and the volume of frequency (second only to radio) that allows advertisers to communicate with virtually all of UK the population through it, and that as a creative canvas it is probably at the very top of the list.

At Mediabridge, we’ve invested over £6m in our platforms which provide the pathway to both types of out of home media trading: automated guaranteed – data led fixed spot forward purchase, and RTB/ programmatic – auction based real time purchases. Virtually all our customer activation is in the former, and most of our work is around making these buying decisions as data led as possible. We think The Brand Gap work done by JCDecaux, following the Binet & Field research, is extremely important. More should be done to make this case for out of home, and maybe less of the programmatic headline grabbing stuff.

We are strong believers in out of home’s programmatic future, but as the VIOOH report suggests, more work needs to be done around data standardisation, comparative pricing, and the scale of inventory available.

That work will be done, but today the biggest USP out of home has remains in its broadcast nature – making this even better may seem less exciting than real time everything.

As someone smart once said; “It’s better to predict dramatic things that don’t happen than boring things that do.”

- Written by Aidan Neill (CEO of Bitposter)