Sheri Ham is the Vice President of Programmatic Partnerships and Sales for Intersection. She began her career with the digital team of WIRED Magazine, and she developed her interest and focus in programmatic over the last 10 years. Prior to joining Intersection in March of 2021, Ham held leadership roles at Nativo, Diply and Monster. She has deeply rooted expertise in digital media and ad tech and is currently responsible for leading all of Intersection’s programmatic efforts. Billboard Insider talked with Ham about trends in the programmatic market.

How’s programmatic out-of-home doing in the US?

eMarketer reported that the out-of-home programmatic market will reach $533 million this year. What we’re seeing in 2022 is major growth – growth in transaction volume, growth in revenue, and growth in the number of brands using programmatic. Programmatic is growing fast because buyers like the flexibility that’s offered and the ability to execute campaigns that are not only scalable, but measurable. Many agencies have turned to programmatic lately, especially amid the pandemic, since it drastically shortens media planning cycles and makes the process more efficient.

If the buying cycle is shorter, what safeguards prevent an ad with controversial content from being distributed programmatically across a bunch of screens?

We manually approve all ads that run on Intersection screens. We want to ensure that we have eyes on all campaigns that run across our screens in public locations and that the ad content is brand-safe and vetted appropriately.

If you could change two things about the way buyers think about Intersection and programmatic, what would you change?

(1) There is a perception that digital out-of-home is the top of the funnel and all about brand awareness. We have the tools now to target and measure outcomes further down the marketing funnel. Brands can now use targeting tools like ​​geo-targeting and POI radius targeting and measure metrics like foot traffic, app downloads and brand recall. LinkNYC, for instance, has 4,000 screens in close proximity to New York retailers, and we can conduct foot traffic studies to show how a certain group of screens can impact store traffic. Through a third-party vendor, we have the opportunity to leverage loyalty card data to show how a group of screens impacted shopping decisions. Additionally, we can leverage dynamic mapping, where an individual sees a brand message and a map with directions to the nearest retail location incorporated into the ad unit to further engage the audience.

(2) There are a lot of screens out there, but not all screens are created equal. You need to know several things about a screen – what is the screen’s audience and location? Is it street level? Is it transit or airport? What is the screen’s value?

How do programmatic buyers connect with Intersection?

Intersection partners with Place Exchange, which used to be under Intersection’s umbrella but is now a standalone company, as the access point for our programmatic buyers. We are constantly thinking about how to expand programmatic access, and we have some exciting new partnerships in the works.

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