Whether you want to build your brand and gain approval within a particular community, or you need to drive sales of a new product, the dynamic, programmatic possibilities of DOOH can help you.
A panel discussion at Campaign’s recent Outdoor Media Summit revealed the range of opportunities for DOOH and how the fast-moving tech can bring digital advertising and OOH closer together.
Sophisticated but simple
A three-way partnership between clothing retailer New Look, world-leading programmatic DOOH adtech platform Hivestack and Kepler showed how flexible and agile DOOH technology now is.
New Look’s goal was to increase brand awareness and footfall traffic for the launch of their new Autumn/Winter collection.
Hivestack’s ‘Custom Audience’ solution utilises programmatic technology across DOOH screens to allow marketers to create custom geofences and audience segments to define where and who they are targeting using thoroughly vetted privacy-compliant mobile device identification. Potential New Look customers were identified in a variety of locations, including New Look stores but also in competitor ‘battlegrounds’. These potential customers were then served with dynamic New Look content on DOOH screens.
“This kind of audience targeting sophistication and what we’re able to achieve now in OOH is exciting for me,” said William Brownsdon, managing director for EMEA at Hivestack. “There are multiple targeting strategies that are available from a single platform, and DOOH buyers can set multiple KPIs that they can then measure and be accountable for. That’s a massive leap forward for the channel.”
A footfall traffic study was run following the campaign measuring the success between audiences that were exposed to the campaign, and those that were not. The results showed a 73% lift in store visits between control and exposed groups..
Geolocation, geolocation, geolocation
The pandemic changed behaviours overnight and for sellers of the Big Issue magazine, lockdown restrictions undermined their whole raison d’être. Like many businesses and organisations, the Big Issue Group was forced into a significant digital transformation.
Part of that transformation was the award-winning campaign, “I’m Here”, from the Forever Beta agency, which launched when vendors were again able to sell on the streets.
Vendors’ distinctive red tabards were redesigned with geotagging beacons. The beacons tracked vendors as they walked along the street and streamed a digital ad featuring that vendor when they were in range of specific screens. Gestures and emotions were captured from the vendors to bring their characters to life on the billboard.
“When you’re walking on a busy high street, there is a lot going on,” explained Zoe Hayward, chief marketing officer of Big Issue Group, “so giving vendors a greater visibility was a big part of welcoming them back after the pandemic.”
The campaign produced significant results for the Big Issue with sales up by 400%, social engagement up a staggering 860%, and a 26% increase in positive brand sentiment.
Quality creative for brand uplift
Tesco’s ‘Together this Ramadan’ campaign targeted areas with large Muslim populations such as Birmingham, Bradford and Brent in London.
The ad featured a table full of empty plates that, around 30 minutes before sunset, faded into food-filled dishes signifying Iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
Tom Mardon, head of media and campaign planning at Tesco, described the campaign as “a unique and deliberate creative execution to support the Muslim community during Ramadan”.
According to Mardon, the campaign scored a 'higher net sentiment' score than their most recent Christmas ad. “We were really happy with the reaction it received and saw some lovely sentiment from content creators in the Muslim community. It was a brilliant creative execution and really harnessed the power of DOOH advertising.”
Putting the D in DOOH
Brownsdon believes that the technological developments in DOOH are blurring the lines between digital buying and OOH buying – and he hopes those two silos will soon merge.
“The biggest problem [for an agency] is where does DOOH sit – with OOH planners or with the digital teams? This has been the hardest thing to break down. We want to see people in agencies champion programmatic DOOH – you’ll build a new breed of planner. Programmatic doesn’t bring complexity, it makes everything simpler.”
Tesco’s Easter 2022 campaign promoted seven different products across a range of urban locations based on the most popular internet searches in that area. “This was how we made the most of digital outdoor in a wider national buy,” explained Mardon.
“Five or six years ago DOOH was a way to extend the reach of our ‘paper and paste’ but now we’re ready to invest in it and make the most of the medium. It was a really good way to harness the power of digital and localise with relative ease.”
How social and DOOH work together
Both Tesco’s Ramadan campaign and the Big Issue’ “I’m Here” show the relationship between social and DOOH content.
Mardon explained that the Tesco campaign was “picked up organically” and they followed up with PR. For the Big Issue, “social was a big part of it”. Hayward added: “One of the big learnings is how we can do that with other campaigns – how we can target certain regions and audiences, using it almost as a bit of a stunt to generate a conversation that plays out on social.”
Brownsdon concluded: “It’s closing the loop. You start with a single billboard that drives a conversation on social channels and push it back to OOH. OOH content is short-form, often without sound, some formats have motion that you can utilise in different environments.” In other words, just like social content.
New spaces, new audiences
Brownsdon believes that DOOH is opening up whole new areas of possibility. “OOH has traditionally been transit and roadside environments, but now you’ve got a huge variety of locations including office space, cinemas, gyms, student unions, airports and bars,” he said.
“There are so many more formats and environments with the ability to target audiences programmatically in all those environments. We know more than we ever have about the lifecycle of a single stream and DOOH is now a really cost-effective way of hitting tough- to-reach audiences at various points throughout the day.”
Bring me sunshine
Weather drives behaviour and, according to Brownsdon, “weather has been under-utilised in OOH”.
Mardon agreed and explained that the tech was the issue. “One of the use cases for programmatic DOOH is in summertime when the temperature reaches a certain point people are more likely to buy ice cream,” he explained. “But when we’ve tried to activate that in real time, the infrastructure wasn’t yet in place. Now it is.”
Upward trajectory
DOOH in the UK “has grown massively in the last two years”, according to Brownsdon, where it is now on a par with France and Germany.
“We’ve talked about programmatic DOOH for many years but we couldn't activate at scale before. I believe those barriers have come down now,” said Brownsdon.