Bryan Mongeau is a co-founder and VP Technology at BroadSign, a company which provides software solutions to outdoor advertising companies. BroadSign has an automated platform which powers over 120,000 digital signage displays in venues such as airports, cinemas, shopping malls and offices. Mongeau has 16 years experience in software development including 13 years developing software for the digital signage industry. Insider spoke with Mongeau about how software is changing the outdoor industry.
Bryan, how did you happen to get involved in the outdoor advertising business?
As a young developer, I had co-founded a small software consulting firm with a college friend right at the end of the dot-com boom. We were doing various projects for customers to make ends meet during the 2000-2003 tech downturn. We landed a project to build a CMS system for thin client desktops in hotel rooms. We completed that project on time and on budget, so the sponsoring company asked us to participate full-time in a new product they were launching: Digital Signage Software-as-a-Service. In 2003 that was pretty hot stuff. So we folded our consultancy and joined BroadSign to start building the product and service. The next four years for me were all about building out the product, landing clients and growing the business. Gradually, I moved into a more managerial role to provide guidance and oversight to our growing team.
What does BroadSign do and how can it assist outdoor advertising companies?
BroadSign is a technology provider to digital OOH companies. Our automated, rules-based platform and software as a service model makes us a great fit for media owners looking to maximize the revenue potential of their installed screens. Our smart player software drives the displays and connects to our cloud to receive instructions about available campaigns. Increasingly, we are seeing adoption of programmatic workflows that connect digital out-of-home supply to omnichannel programmatic buying platforms for cross-screen campaigns and access to new buyers and budgets. Our platform makes just-in-time decisions on how to maximize the revenue of each and every ad play while meeting the constraints of direct-sold campaigns.
In essence, BroadSign is an ad delivery and optimization platform for digital out-of-home.
Marc Andreessen wrote “software is eating the world” in a famous 2011 Wall Street Journal article. Is this so with respect to outdoor?
Definitely, this is a universal edict of the age we live in. It’s safe to say that digital out-of-home has already been fully “eaten” by software and traditional out-of-home is in the process of being eaten. Traditional still has a lot of Excel wizards managing huge spreadsheets and sales staff pushing paper around. Traditional will get eaten by software in three ways: increasing automation and optimization of direct-sold campaigns, increasing conversions to digital and, eventually, integration of traditional supply in the programmatic buying stack.
Many people are trying to develop an automated platform for ad sales. What has to happen for this effort to succeed?
I’ve been around this space long enough to see many successes and failures. Ultimately it is all about scale and transparency. If you make our medium easy to buy, easy to understand and a buyer can get the audience they are seeking, then it will succeed. If you look at the online world, programmatic buying of digital and mobile has exploded because of those three reasons: easy to buy, easy to understand and the audience at scale is there. The enormous growth has happened even despite high levels of fraud and viewability issues. Outdoor is virtually free of these problems but is not currently easy to buy and audience reporting is not standardized with that of online just yet. Once those problems are solved, it will take off.
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