Better Measurement Equals More Dollars for DOOH

Roey Franco, VP Product and Innovation, Xaxis

By Roey Franco, VP Product & Innovation, XAXIS

The events of this year have heightened the imperative to provide better and more realtime data for digital out-of-home advertising.

Media buyers have recently seemed a bit cautious about DOOH, questioning metrics that are based on historical patterns that have been severely disrupted during the pandemic. Car and foot traffic throughout the country, at malls, airports, doctors’ offices, gyms and rail stations, have seen monthly or even weekly variations that vary by DMA. Heavily trafficked spots like New York’s Times Square, L.A.’s Westwood neighborhood, and Chicago’s Loop district (to mention just a few) have seen troughs and spikes in visitor numbers throughout the spring, summer, and fall.

More than ever, buyers need to be assured that screens are correctly measured and impressions calculated for the latest conditions to help them feel confident in their DOOH spends.  By improving impression metrics and giving proof those metrics are current, we can increase their enthusiasm and shorten the timeline for media spend to come back in. If the medium is more measurable we can generate more demand.

Buyers certainly look ready to jump in, with 59% saying they plan to increase spend on DOOH in the next 18 months, according to a survey released last month by Verizon. The survey found that more than 90% of media buyers believe DOOH improves brand metrics and delivers on both upper and lower funnel goals.

In October, Nielsen discontinued its place-based location audit service, leaving Geopath (formerly the Traffic Audit Bureau) as the dominant measurement and traffic auditing service for the majority of U.S.-based OOH media owners. Geopath’s data, such as reports on how Covid19 affects patterns down to the county level, are tremendously useful.

To regain marketers’ confidence, we need to verify and cross-check, to layer that kind of data with as many realtime sources as we can to create a unique relevance score and confirm that available impressions are provided according to current conditions. We must accurately apply multipliers to the data we have in as granular a fashion as possible for every available screen by weighting data from sources that include:

  • Monitors for passing traffic, such as cameras that in real-time capture car and foot traffic at streets, sidewalks, and malls.
  • Publicly available APIs from municipalities, and map and navigation apps.
  • Partners’ anonymized mobile-device aggregation data.

Omnichannel techniques deployed with DOOH buys will further help leverage programmatic capabilities and maximize the effectiveness of the media buys. Research shows how out-of-home advertising used in concert with mobile, TV, and other advertising formats can bolster purchase intent and brand favorability. DOOH, especially on screens that can be accessed via programmatic channels, can then enable advertisers to quickly shift spend, messaging, and targeting in line with what’s happening on the ground. We need to adjust pricing, too, as conditions morph and evolve well into next year, to match what’s actually available during any given campaign.

We need, too, to be nimble in factoring in other news events such as political demonstrations and massive storms that influence people’s movements, as well as any regulatory or technological changes. Apple’s decision to suppress device ID tracking by early next year, for example, will impact the ability to glean device-specific location information. That could make it harder to score individual screens for their relative value with respect to specific audience segments. We’ll have to employ new data mixes and increase scale as well as diversify data inputs to assure buyers the impressions on the screens they buy are relevant to the audiences they want to reach.

Today, the best news we have is that vaccines are on the way, and that the economy will be poised for significant growth. By infusing DOOH metrics with better data, the industry will be positioned  to capture benefits from the burst of new activity. In the past five years, DOOH has doubled its share of the OOH spending, according to eMarketer, and we can accelerate the trend. By increasing trust and accuracy, by making DOOH measurement that much more accurate to every moment, we’ll make digital out-of-home advertising that much more appealing for brand marketers, enticing new levels of spending far into the future.

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