DOOH gets personal. Programmatic techniques are revolutionising DOOH.

Out Of Home media (OOH) might be sexy again, but Digital OOH (DOOH) goes the full Monty. Programmatic techniques are revolutionising DOOH media buying and there are huge gains to be made for advertisers who are ready to go all the way. Programmatic strategies leveraging data for more targeted, relevant media placements have transformed how OOH can be planned, how creative can be utilised and, crucially, how it can be optimised and developed.

An offline OOH plan tends to be only a couple of dozen rows of data at most, but a programmatic plan can use hundreds of thousands, millions or even billions of rows of data – about audience, performance and much more. This makes OOH planning a much more precise science than ever before and unlocks huge amounts of value for those that do it well. It also allows cross-media planning and attribution to go to the next level, using location, time and activity as an identifier so advertisers – for the first time – have the data to choose precisely which spots to buy and understand how that effects the cross-media mix.

Programmatic in OOH also allows for much more advanced creative executions. Utilising the location and the activity of people who view the creative makes it much more powerful and personal. For example, standing at a bus stop or walking from a carpark to the shops could easily use more relevant messages that have more impact. Delivering different creative executions at different times and storyboarding further enhance value. These executions, possible before but expensive and hard to scale, are now available for marketers to plan with confidence.

While the value of these two areas is important, it is hugely magnified by the third – the ability to optimise media much faster than ever before. By identifying location, time and activity and comparing this to website data, store footfall and social response data you can analyse message impact much more quickly than methods traditionally used in OOH media. This allows for different campaigns to be tested and optimised with precision on the fly. Media spots can be adjusted – moving to high performance areas in the same way that it’s been done in programmatic online for many years, turbocharging performance.

Such is the value of these techniques that media owners are also set to benefit. The concept of individual, fixed term campaigns for OOH may become less common than always-on techniques that continue to learn, adapt and optimise to drive huge value for advertiser and media owner alike. It’s an exciting time for everyone in the OOH industry who likes to see exciting, engaging marketing done well!

By Rob Webster, Chief Strategy Officer, Crimtan.