Ari Buchalter has been CEO of the programmatic out of home company Place Exchange for 4 years. He was also previously the CEO of Intersection. He gave an insightful talk at the fall 2022 IBO conference. We asked him to amplify some comments.
You mentioned that programmatic out of home can grow revenues in a recession.
Historically, programmatic advertising has actually done very well during recessions, driven mainly by three factors. First, programmatic dramatically simplifies workflows around campaign planning, activation, and management – making it much easier to set up and run an OOH campaign across many media owners. The ability to do “more with less” is often important to buyers during a recession. Second, programmatic OOH offers tremendous flexibility, which is also highly valued during periods of uncertainty. For example, programmatic gives buyers the ability to launch and pause campaigns in real-time, change budgets, pacing, or flighting mid-campaign, and swap out creatives on the fly to take advantage of new opportunities or respond to evolving market conditions. Last but not least, programmatic enables deterministic measurement of OOH performance so that buyers can understand the ROI impact of their campaigns. During tight times, the media that gets cut first is the media whose performance is unknown, and conversely the media driving measurable business results is the most likely to keep going. We saw all of this play out during the recession of 2020, when programmatic OOH grew by strong triple digits, even as overall OOH spending took a hit.
What is PlaceExchange’s PerView product and what does it offer to buyers and sellers of OOH?
PerView is a product we developed in line with the OAAA OOH Impression Measurement Guidelines that provides dynamic, up-to-date Reach, Frequency, and Impression (RFI) measurement across all OOH media venues and formats. PerView isn’t limited to just programmatic buys or media that transacts on Place Exchange. It can be applied to static or digital media, whether sold directly or programmatically. It’s used by buyers to measure Reach & Frequency for OOH campaigns for pre-campaign planning, mid-campaign optimization, and post-campaign validation, with measurement that can be performed at the aggregate population level or for specific audiences of interest. It’s also used by media owners to measure Reach, Frequency, and Impressions for all OOH assets in their networks, spanning outdoor, transit, street furniture and place-based media. The ability to apply a consistent measurement approach across all the varied categories and subcategories of OOH is especially important, given that most advertiser campaigns, as well as many media owner networks, span a diverse mix of asset types and there is duplication of reach across consumers. The fact that PerView is based on up-to-date data at the individual face level is also important to buyers, who understand that conditions “on the ground” are always in flux and expect to see numbers that are different for different locations and different times.
As more and more dollars flow into OOH from other channels such as online, TV, and social, buyers are asking the same kinds of measurement-related questions about OOH as they do for those other channels, and expect to see measurement approaches that are scalable, consistent, and accountable. Just as there are multiple solutions that provide measurement in channels like online, mobile, and TV, as OOH grows we may see more innovations around measurement that address the needs of an increasingly diverse set of buyers.
Anything else on your mind?
A lot of excitement about the current tailwinds for OOH, which arise in part from the headwinds that other channels are facing. From the declining reach of linear TV, to bot fraud and brad safety issues online, to signal loss with mobile and social media, we are seeing OOH benefit from a “flight to quality” as more and more digital advertisers come to understand that OOH offers massive reach at low cost and unparalleled levels of consumer engagement and trust. Add to that the fact that OOH can now be targeted through the lens of audiences as opposed to only locations, and can be tied to measurable business outcomes, and you have a powerful recipe for OOH to continue to increase its share of the overall media mix.
