Digital Out of Home Advertising’s Spring Awakening — Springing Into Action as Identifiers Coil

As advertisers are increasingly looking at a cookieless future, out-of-home advertising is preparing to be the hero of the advertising world. In this article, Barry Frey, president and CEO, DPAA, discusses the advantages of DOOH that make it attractive to advertisers.

While many industries and businesses came out of 2020 dealing with their collective wounds from economic issues invoked by the pandemic, the digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising industry is using 2021 as its springboard into 2022’s new world.

Out-of-home (OOH) advertising, of course, faced its challenges in 2020, yet so much, not readily apparent was accomplished.

As the digitization of OOH has impressively grown, the programmatic and data capabilities demonstrated OOH’s new “superpowers” during COVID-19.

Advertisers and agencies were deftly able to pause, push and move around ad schedules sans negotiations, contracts, and great amounts of human bandwidth involved.

Additionally, behind the scenes, new tracks and pipes were connected amongst media owners, data platforms, SSPs and DSPs…all readying DOOH for double-digit growth in 2021 as projected by the large advertiser holding companies.

Programmatic organizations such as Adomni, Broadsign, Hivestack, Verizon Media, VIOOH, Vistar, Xaxis, and others are leading this direction as “normalcy” returns, and people are eager to get out and about. All boding very well for the out-of-home industry. And believe it or not, other media industry trends such as the IDFA move to an opt-in mindset as well as the forthcoming (2022) Google Chrome cookie dispatch are as auspicious as well.

These changes have many marketers scratching their heads and digital publishers gnashing their teeth at the prospective loss of advertising sales revenue. And rightfully so! The move to a user-focused, opt-in world will not affect just programmatic ad sales revenue. Direct ad sales and sponsorship dollars are also at risk. Reliance on third-party data made segmenting, targeting, retargeting, and the construction of look-alike audiences most facile. The need to build an internal infrastructure that captured, maintained and shared audience data across multiple functional areas within an organization wasn’t given much thought because third-party data and data management platforms (DMPs) made niche-ing down and selling up almost frictionless.

The Lifeline in a Cookieless World

A future in which all this goes away is scary to many.

However, DOOH could potentially be the lifeline advertisers are looking for. The digital out-of-home space is uniquely positioned to succeed despite the IDFA changes and soon-to-be cookie-less world.

DOOH already possesses myriad features attractive to advertisers: It boasts an inventory that is brand safe, fraud-free and located in quality environments offering brilliant digital screens. Information, news, and entertainment programming content engages viewers, and the ads can’t be fast-forwarded or skipped and are 100% viewable. DOOH venues are all along a customer’s path to purchase, from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel, presenting advertisers multiple opportunities to stay top of mind with consumers.

And importantly, today, in a world of “fake news”, partisan and echo chamber messaging, when an ad is out in public for all to see, the messenger is fully exposed and needs to be credible. You can’t lie or hide in the sunshine!

The significance of DOOH’s quality and safety can be best explained by drawing a parallel with bonds in the financial world. During economically unstable times, investors re-allocate their wealth from stocks to bonds because they are perceived as safer (less risky) assets than stocks which can be unpredictable. The “flight to quality”, as it’s called, isn’t just a move executed by a few strategic thinkers. Rather, it’s a predictable industry movement enacted “en masse.”  DOOH inventory is the “bond” of the advertising world.

With all the uncertainty the impending IDFA and Google Chrome changes will create in the market, DOOH stands to gain a much greater share of advertising spend in 2022 as marketers “flee to quality.”

Measurement — A Key Driver

Ironically, measurement, an old argument against the inclusion of out-of-home in a media plan, is now another compelling reason for marketers to re-direct their ad spend to OOH and DOOH. Much of the industry’s measurement is not based on cookies. Instead, it is validated by industry-leading providers like Epicenter, Comscore, GeoPath, Ubimo, Kochava, and a litany of great mobile data sets from Ground Truth, PlaceIQ, M4, amongst many others. That methodology doesn’t require cookies, another distinct advantage that OOH and DOOH offer to advertisers looking to gather audience data as part of their goals.

Of course, the topic of measurement can’t be raised without comment on its companion, attribution. The intent of IDFA “reform” is to limit tracking for marketing purposes on iOS by giving users the ad decline to opt-in for location tracking. The market expects huge numbers of iPhone users to opt-out, thus negatively affecting digital media buying. While delivery may become more challenged to mobile apps, the attribution perspective is a different story, which helps DOOH media owners. This enables tracking on iOS users who have opted in as well as (planned for at least the next 1-2 years) on Google Android.

As such, sampled measurement data can still be utilized to show audiences and conversions based on that sampling. As this is a widely used measurement option, it will remain intact. The advantage it offers is one of stability amidst a rough sea of chaotic, “changing” workflow for other platforms.

Lastly, creativity doesn’t need to begin and end in the marketing department. Necessity is the mother of invention, and as such, stricter privacy policies offer the ad and Martech ecosystem another instance to adapt and change.

And, of course, context matters. And now, relatively speaking, it matters even more as consumers are actively coming out and seeing relevant ads in supermarkets, malls, cinemas, office buildings, points of care, gyms, gas stations, public transit, roads and more. Additionally, and excitedly, many of the media owners operating in these venues have available first-party data.

Doing it within the DOOH industry seems like the most natural place to flex new technology. After all, DOOH has been the most creative and innovative medium of late, especially when you think of all the special, contextually relevant places digital out-of-home ads seem to pop up.

While the future seems grim to some, savvy marketers are working hard behind the scenes to set themselves up for a prosperous 2022 — a 2022 in which digital out-of-home advertising plays a starring role.