Outdoor took a big step into the digital world in 2018, as Digital Out of Home (DOOH) became the second fastest growing media channel, behind mobile.
This has been driven by mass-digitisation of sites. Market-leader JCDecaux passed the 50% digital milestone a few years ago, while a recent announcement from Clear Channel revealed that 60% of their revenue is now generated through DOOH (up from just 2% as recently as 2016). And it’s more effective than paper & paste – a recent study shows that DOOH ads are twice as likely to be seen and 2.5 times more impactful.
With this growth we have seen the launch of the programmatic supply exchange VIOOH – Global’s bold move into OOH the acquisitions of Primesight, Outdoor Plus and then Exterion.
A greater volume of impressions is now ‘addressable’ with many programmatic buying platforms (DSPs) now able to access and buy DOOH inventory (Verizon, Scoota, TheTradeDesk, MediaMath, Adform, Appnexus, Outmoove, Vistar, and more).
For 2019 a connected data strategy will sit at the heart of DOOH buys – with data feeds fuelling when, where, and what, to run as the ‘new normal’ across DOOH. Customised, dynamic, full motion and high-quality digital ads will quickly fill the UK’s outdoor spaces.
This creates opportunities for better joined-up mobile and DOOH, with the ability to buy formats across both in a single platform, linking audiences, time, location and message.
As such, we expect brands’ online social voices to be brought onto the streets more and more, with brand effective metrics said to increase by 23% when included in outdoor ads.
We expect further growth as more branding budget is allocated to digital, with channels better-optimised and digital creative optimised for larger screens.
Marketers will be able to increase the efficiency of outdoor through more-targeted audience buys, and improved performance through more relevant, second-by-second, dynamic creative.
The big question will be how measurement advances across outdoor, with more ability to look at brand engagement and attention through digital and data connections – we may soon get to the stage of bringing this huge traditional ‘herding behaviour’ channel into a closer customer context.
Location data services, data hubs and, of course, Google, will likely be big drivers for this: location, maps and search data will have a huge part in bringing the impact of OOH into the full media mix.
