Digital Out of Home: What’s Next?
Adshel’s digital and technology sales manager, Rick Goodwin, talks about the powerful combination of out of home media and the benefits of digital capabilities, and how it is creating opportunities for advertisers to pinpoint the right message to the right audience at the right time.
There’s never been a more electrifying time for the outof-home media industry as advances in digital technology and capabilities present more opportunities than ever before.
The launch of digital OOH has boosted what is already a very effective channel in the New Zealand media landscape, providing more opportunity for advertisers as it attracts a greater number of eyeballs through the brightness and movement of what was previously a static medium.
I’ve seen how digital has really turned OOH on its head, transforming the creative capabilities in a real-world environment. Digital gives OOH the ability to react in real-time and adjust creative messaging on the street, with seldomly discussed dynamic messaging now becoming more and more commonplace.
The current scale and
continued rollout of digital OOH assets in New Zealand has us approaching a point of commoditisation. With advertisers now using the medium to its fullest, our next focus is around product development and innovation, which will be key to OOH’S evolution and where audience location data will come to the fore.
OOH + MOBILE = MOOHBILE
Mobile devices are a proxy for us as humans - wherever they are, we are. Drawing anonymous, aggregated data through these devices, we can begin to understand movement patterns of audiences as they go about their day.
A person’s geo-location, plus added context through time-stamping of the data, can provide a well-rounded insight to their Behavioural Profile. For example, if a mobile device was picked up at Les Mills at 1pm, an Indoor Cricket court on Wednesday evening, and Eden Park on Saturday night – we can almost certainly profile them as an ‘avid sportsperson’.
The same philosophy can be used to understand purchase intent. Identifying when a person is actually ‘in-market’ – based on stores they’ve visited, and the frequency of these visits.
With New Zealanders spending more and more time away from home, and 92 percent of purchases still occurring within brick and mortar locations - impacting consumers whilst OOH, or on their path to purchase, is imperative. Audience Location Data will enable advertisers to optimize their OOH planning to fulfill this.
We are having more and more of these types of discussions with advertisers, furthermore, around the combination of OOH and mobile geo-fencing (or ‘moohbile’). We provide the latitude and longitudes of our Adshels, and advertisers can draw imaginary geo-fences over these locations and target people on their mobile devices when they are in vicinity of the bus shelter, or thereafter (if the person has passed through the geo-fence).
Advertisers are tapping into OOH for their broadcast messaging and mobile for a narrowcast retargeted message, transferring messaging seamlessly from the oldest oneto-many medium to one of the newest one-to-one mediums.
A recent US study from Nielsen found that OOH is the most effective offline medium to drive online activation (4x more online activity per ad dollar spent than TV, radio and print) and New Zealand brands have picked up on this.
Moohbile doesn’t come without it challenges, however. And with moobile in its infancy, to protect our advertising partners, we need to continue to challenge our mobile partners; do we have a scalable source of data? Is the data verified? Is the data privacy compliant? The accuracy of this mobile location data is extremely important and overcoming these challenges will be paramount to success.
The movement toward a more fluid delivery of digital OOH creative messaging, one from ‘asset’ to ‘audience’, and the attribution and accountability it brings with it, is becoming a reality and we feel confident we will be ready for it.