Jonny Richardson (lead image), director of business development, Broadsign Australia explains programmatic DOOH and why the buying process is not as complicated as it seems, and can be done in a matter of minutes.
Usually when talking about efficiencies within the context of Programmatic OOH, most conversations centre around CPMs, tech fees or whether it’s more or less expensive than a traditional OOH buy.
However, what is less talked-about is the softer efficiency purely from a time/effort perspective, from planning a campaign to its execution. With agency teams still tending to run lean, spend pressure increasing and client expectations rising, it’s not surprising that time efficiency is climbing up the list of reasons for leveraging programmatic out-of-home (OOH).
Whilst I have always loved OOH as a medium, there is no hiding from the fact (and most providers would concede) that the planning and buying process can sometimes be clunky and time-consuming.
Let’s say, for example, you wanted to get a campaign up and running driving people into your retail stores nationally. There are several factors to consider before its launch.
First, you need to find out what inventory is within your desired locations—for example, a proximity of approximately 2 km around your stores.
This can be a tedious process navigating Google searches, recycling old plans or shouting around the office for advice.
You then need to reach out to the owner of the screens you want to advertise on. If you’re lucky enough to have a relationship with that particular provider, then it’s an email/call to your rep. Or if you’re not a regular customer, you’re often put through to the generic email and sit on your hands until you get a response.
Depending on multiple factors (rep at lunch), you could expect a response anywhere within two/three days. That response will usually comprise of some sites you want, but normally with an extra side of additional packages/sites that might not necessarily be what you were after.
They may have even included an element of audience targeting utilising their proprietary datasets,which are generally pretty impressive.
You then have to piece these responses together like a jigsaw that doesn’t quite have all the pieces. If anything, you have more than you need, pieces that don’t belong in the picture you’re trying to recreate.
Once the decision has been made, so begins the negotiation process. You’ll lock it in, squirm at the different sized rectangles you need to create the various specs, and send them through to a production contact.
In many circumstances, this can take the better part of a week to complete, especially when fitting it into a bus schedule locking in all the other composite parts of your campaign. Just writing out the process is tiring (as I’m sure you are of reading!). But there’s a better way. Let’s dive into the value of programmatic DOOH.
The part of my job I enjoy the most is seeing the faces of people that book OOH on a regular basis (especially those with tricky LAM clients) who begin to understand the simplicity of running a programmatic DOOH campaign, rather than all of this bother and bluster, you can do all of the above in a matter of minutes. I kid you not, I once had a client nearly in tears.
Now the same result (if not better) can be achieved in the below steps/clicks…
Copy and paste your locations into the platform, select your proximity radius to those locations, click ‘add to map’ and immediately surface inventory from the majority of DOOH providers across all formats, from billboards to gas stations, bus shelters to doctors offices. Who knows, it may even bring up a few smaller providers or formats that you might not have heard of or previously considered, but would be a sensible fit for your campaign.
Simply select the formats you’re happy with, choose dates and times you want to run your campaign during (maybe even trigger so your campaign only runs at a particular moment that makes sense with your creative) or overlay an audience segment (from one data source across all formats) set your budget and CPM that you’re satisfied with.
Upload your creative to the platform, which also consolidates resolutions so you don’t have to create quite as many rectangles, and see how easy it is to watch your campaign run on screens within the hour!
Rather than consolidating the mixed bag of delivery reports and PoPs as the campaign is live, you’ll be able to view your campaign’s performance in real-time, and have an overview of where and when your ads are playing. You can even connect via a reporting API to see delivery in keeping with other channels.
The younger agency-side me wading through forests of physically printed proformas (does that still happen!?) would be rejoicing that all invoices are available via one platform, one lovely line in BCC. Obviously, this alone is not a reason for utilising programmatic DOOH, you need to weigh up all the other pros/cons that I’m not going to go into today. There are plenty of other articles on this subject available.
But whether you’re an agency trying to free up time for an already stressed team, an in-house client that doesn’t have the time to be going back-and-forth with everything else they’re doing or a sympathetic client that would love to free up their agency team’s time to focus on other projects, the efficiency of programmatic DOOH is well worth considering.
If you’re keen on freeing up some time, reach out to find out more about how Broadsign can help.
