The continued expansion of digital out of home (DOOH) may have surprised those not keeping an eye on the industry. However, for those at its heart, the ever-growing proportion of ad budget heading towards the channel, with US spending in DOOH surging by 36.9% in 2022, reflects the valuable benefits that it has brought to advertisers and media owners alike.
US brands have been drawn towards the targeted and measurable ways this channel allows them to reach their audience as well as recognize newer and harder to target “in the moment” audiences who have been traditionally missed or previously unaccounted for. Taking advantage of these custom and dynamic opportunities becomes attainable today with the emergence of new formats such as anamorphic video, made possible through advancements in technology and automation.
Further evidence of the maturation of DOOH is that Out of Home spend is set to increase from $2.72 billion in 2020 to $3.84 billion by the end of this year and it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore that programmatic DOOH is a valuable driver of this growth.
Media owners will be looking to respond to this increased demand, and in doing so access an ever-widening array of buyers at both a global and hyper local level. At the same time, directly sold campaigns will still continue to play a vital role in publisher revenue generation. The stability direct campaigns can offer with longer lead times and pre-negotiated flights should help media owners navigate the uncertainty of the current macroeconomic climate.
Publishers looking to diversify their revenue streams and maximize their yield by balancing both programmatic and direct DOOH deals in unison will need to embrace tools that can help them effectively manage their supply from the top down. This means looking beyond utilizing a supply-side platform (SSP), and instead embracing an intelligent ad server that can make sense of all the different deal architectures common in today’s marketplace that must be honored for buyers.
Simplifying ad slot planning
Ad servers have the ability to easily manage and facilitate directly sold and/or programmatic campaigns, making the product a vital part of the media owner’s toolkit. As programmatic DOOH usage has expanded, there has been a shift towards ad servers that seamlessly accommodate programmatically enabled sales, opening up the opportunity for multiple revenue streams for screen network operators.
These evolved solutions are highly agile and even more intelligent by nature, allowing media owners to plan and manage both direct and programmatically sold campaigns simultaneously within one platform. It’s a one-stop-shop for media owners looking to sell ‘spot in the loop’, dynamic ad-insertion, static creative, or programmatic impression based campaign flights.
Driving the yield of inventory
Intelligent ad servers also offer a single, unified platform for publishers to easily manage all of their inventory. The benefits of reducing fragmentation by consolidating campaigns into one unified view are clear, but intelligent ad servers go further to increase yield for media owners.
This starts with scheduling. More traditional ad servers look to book slots based on their availability. A spot in the loop is reserved and then optimization efforts are made after the fact. One way to think of this is as a pushing motion – campaigns are pushed into the scheduler, then optimized. By contrast, intelligent ad servers use a pulling motion. Available campaigns are pulled into slots based on the opportunity for maximum revenue, as decided by an algorithm.
Instead of a scheduler manually managing pre-programmed loops and playlists in a content management system (CMS), an intelligent ad server can decide which screen to activate when and where, to maximize revenue according to design or even customize taxonomies to recognize specific rules. This holistic optimization is only possible due to the dynamic in-flight decisioning enabled by constant feedback and data streams from all demand sources and approaches. It allows inventory to be constantly assessed and prices fine-tuned to further boost returns.
Integrating programmatic selling
Media owners adding programmatic sales into their revenue streams can gain similar levels of control over inventory as direct deals, including specifics granted by parameters around location, format, duration, cost per mille (CPM), and preferred deal partners. Programmatic takes this a step further by automating many of these steps, removing much of the heavy lifting from media owner operators, while driving efficiencies and eliminating errors.
Another key tool that media owners can harness to increase yield and reduce fragmentation is a DOOH Header Bidder. Media owners trading programmatically, often look to integrate as many SSPs as possible. While this increases access to buyers, it can create a fractured and hard to manage framework. Traditionally trading was managed via a waterfall auction methodology, with inventory offered to each ad network individually before being moved to the next buyer when the floor price was not met. Instead, Header Bidding allows for inventory to be offered to multiple SSPs simultaneously, increasing competition and creating greater yield for publishers in a transparent and asynchronous manner.
Intelligent ad servers are an indispensable tool for publishers looking to maximize their yield across both direct and programmatic DOOH. As demand continues for automation, the solutions that publishers use to manage their workflow will also continue to evolve.
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