Why Programmatic DOOH Advertising Is The Immediate Weapon For Brands

In this guest post, Chi Lo (lead image), The Trade Desk’s director of accounts, looks at the myriad of pluses programmatic digital out of home can bring to brands…

It’s our first restriction-free Summer in two years and Aussies are itching to travel. In June 2022 alone, nearly 170,000 Australians returned from short trips overseas according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and as Christmas fast approaches, travel plans are the talk of the town. Whether it be a trip up or down the coast or jet setting to Bali, we can expect consumers to spend significantly more time on the freeway and in airport lounges, gazing at billboards.

In the wake of this development, digital out-of-home (DooH) advertising is once again very popular with brands. According to IAB’s Australia’s latest DooH State of the Nation survey, nearly seven in 10 Australian agencies have utilised DooH as a regular or significant part of advertising campaigns this year. Regular or significant use of programmatic digital out-of-home (PDooH) advertising has grown by 41 percent since last year.

The dynamic nature of DooH screens means that creativity can be crafted to suit the context of a particular audience. This allows advertisers to target Summer-travellers with items such as bathers, sunscreen, clothing and travel deals before their trip. PDooH is advantageous for marketers and industries needing to adapt their messaging on a regular basis, as it provides the ability to modify their advertising campaigns in real-time.

This is because programmatic buying makes it easier to serve different creative in a campaign – especially when targeting in the appropriate environments. After all, screens in a doctor’s office, for example, are very different from those in an airport waiting area. Instead of booking inventory separately with each individual provider at fixed conditions, advertisers can instead concentrate on where the focus should be in the course of the campaign. Depending on this, programmatic bids can be made for the impression in a specific environment that corresponds to the campaign objective or the right target group – and at the price that the advertiser has assigned to this impression.

With campaigns on PDooH, you can start and pause campaigns with agility. Motifs can be easily exchanged, and budgets can be adapted at any time. This allows marketers to focus more on developing the right strategies, and the technology takes care of the extensive computing that analyses countless data sets to identify suitable advertising spaces and optimise budgets to guarantee campaign success.

Data on the weather, time of day, and even public transport timetables can also be used to optimise the rollout of an advertising campaign. As an example, a train may arrive at Sydney’s Central Station at 7.00pm, the standard time for when most people eat dinner. As passengers alight the train, PDooH advertisements placed in their line of sight can be switched to show the most popular restaurants in the city, optimising the audience reach for these brands.

Even more excitingly, PDooH advertising is now an accessible pillar of effective omnichannel marketing strategies. This is because it enables consistent, identifiable brand promotion and personalised messaging to individual consumers across multiple channels throughout an advertising campaign. The Trade Desk’s data-driven advertising platform enables brands to optimise their advertisements across multiple channels, including PDooH,  BVOD, mobile apps, online video, display advertising, and gaming.  Channels that have rarely been mentioned in the same sentence are also growing together here – DooH and audio, for example.

Another key pillar in the growth of PDooH is measurement. At a time when advertisers have to prove the impact of every dollar spent, the ability to measure outdoor advertising is critical. According to a recently published study by WallDecaux and APG/SGA, respondents see gross reach (impressions), net contacts, brand awareness and performance KPIs such as store visits and footfall as the most relevant metrics. In recent years, great progress has been made in this area, both in measuring reach and in proving the link between exposure to an out-of-home ad and the purchase of a product.

With our insatiable appetite to reconnect with the world, advertisers should seize the opportunities of PDooH and ensure it is part of the advertising mix for every marketing campaign.