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Episode 11

Beyond Billboards: Digital Out-of-Home Explained

Illustration of Chris Allison, VP Marketplace Partnerships at Vistar Media

About This Episode

February 8, 2023

We discuss why programmatic DOOH can help marketers engage your target audience in public spaces, helping drive brand awareness and engagement.

Chris Allison | VP Marketplace Partnerships, Vistar Media

00:00

Transcript

Episode Introduction (00:00:00)

Let’s be honest, humans are pretty boring, you probably know the to take the same way to work same way at home, dropping your kids off at school, picking them up at the same time, maybe going to the gym at the same time in the day, going a lot of the same places for lunch, right? we’re creatures of habit. And that plays out all the data that we see. And so as a marketer, you know, something to think about is it’s less about what category Am I in and more about, Am I reaching my audience at the right place and at the right time, so that I’m displaying relevant messaging, and I’m being really efficient about my bio, and targeting those locations where I think my audience is going to be, so that I’m delivering that on target message.

How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:38)

But then you think about the social landscape, the research and data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touch points, so that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart if you’re tuning in to How Agencies Thrive podcast.

Matt (00:00:59)

Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive podcast. My name is Matt, and I’m on the Education and Development team at StackAdapt. And today, we have a very special episode centered around digital out-of-home. This year, this ad format is on an upward trajectory. So let’s peel back the layers a little bit and get a comprehensive understanding of how you can leverage this in your upcoming campaigns. Today, we’re joined by Chris Allison, who’s the VP of platform partnerships at Vistar Media. So welcome, Chris. And as always, we’d like to get a better sense of who our guests are and what their experiences. So to help get everybody up to speed. Tell us a little bit about Vistar media along with yourself your role and your experience in the industry.

Chris (00:01:43)

Matt, thanks for having me. For the audience. Again, my name is Chris Allison, I run our platform partnerships at Vistar media. I’ve been at Vistar for over five years and and really my team’s focus is really growing our omni-channel DSP partners, and really getting them to a place where they are investing in the digital out-of-home space, with the same level of efficacy that they are with with any other channel. And and so Vistar media for the audience here is is really the leading and largest global, programmatic digital out-of-home marketplace. We’ve been doing it for 10 years, our two co-founders, Michael Provenzano, Mark Chadwick were actually part of the original co founding team of a company so many years back called invite media, which some of you may know, now as, you know, Google’s DoubleClick bid manager. So suffice it to say they knew a thing or two about the programmatic space. And, you know, early, early days at Vistar, they really just saw an interesting opportunity with, with digital out-of-home space, because there were, there was so much fragmentation, you had so many different media owners, different CMS that they were using, there wasn’t really an easy way to just log into a system and start buying, you know, across all the digital home media today. And so I think your original question around like, you know, what is digital home sort of coming to that, it’s more than just billboards, right. And I think that’s the first thing that people think about, and don’t get me wrong, we love our billboard partners, they are a huge share of any marketers digital out-of-home spend, it tends to be viewed as, you know, sort of a critical investment in terms of diversity of venue types, but billboards are, you know, one of many venue types in our ecosystem. So think about it, like we’re talking about malls, doctors, offices, schools, taxis, office buildings. And you know, and there’s so much more really, really, it’s just a great opportunity to reach people when they’re arguably more receptive to advertising in these sort of, like transitional moments of the day. So think about driving to work, or, you know, waiting in the elevator, you see on the screen there, right? Or you’re sitting at the bar, maybe you’re watching the game, or you’re at the elliptical, right, you’re you’re exercising at the gym, and you see a screen there, right? Or maybe even at the checkout aisle, right when you’re at the grocery store, and have an opportunity to see relevant messaging there. Again, so many different screens, the simplest way to look at is it’s really any non private device used for advertising. So if it’s a public screen, it’s available. And that means the owners opted in for advertising. That’s an opportunity for a marketer to reach their consumer, again, at all these really interesting times in the day on their path to purchase. And, and the coolest thing about it to me is, even since I started this star, there are all new media owners bringing really interesting inventory into the market in ways that you might not think about, whether it’s like an electric vehicle charging station, whether it’s you know, audio and a grocery store. Are and you know, even media that even think was possible to be made available through software. So, you know, Times Square is now largely available through programmatic pipes, right? You can buy Clear Channel, new tradition out front, branded cities, right, all those, you know, spectacular screens, you would think are only available for direct buys are actually now available programmatically. And then think about the movie theaters, I don’t even think you could actually do this. But you know, right before the movie plays, if you get there early, and personally, you know, when I do go to the movies with my wife, the preference for us is to show up early, I like relaxing, just kind of watching the previews getting even earlier, there, you see a lot of ads before the preview start, we have a partner at Screenvision, that makes their inventory available programmatically. So once you start to kind of peel back, you know, and look under the hood, so to speak, you start to realize, Wow, this is a really robust ecosystem that has all kinds of really relevant inventory, and all depends on you know, sort of what your, what your goals are, and you know, the type of message you’re trying to get out there and market.

Matt (00:06:10)

Fantastic. And my first question, just to help get everybody up to speed, you know, some of our listeners are a little bit more versed in this topic, some are just learning about it for the first time. But when we think of, you know, your traditional out-of-home advertising, how does digital out-of-home differ? What are some of those benefits of using digital at home and putting your media dollars towards it?

Chris (00:06:35)

I think digital digital home is one of those mediums that I think historically has been, you know, a challenge for folks to measure the effectiveness of right. And a lot of questions that we get from our buyers and our partners are well, you know, what, who is digital home best suited for? You know, are there certain verticals that, you know, advertisers are do better at in digital out-of-home versus others. And, you know, I would say it’s true that there’s some verticals that were always invested heavily in a channel. And, you know, think about like local advertising, local advertising is about 40% of the digital home market. The rest is largely national, but, you know, local has done really well. And it’s a you know, great messaging to drive people to your local QSR retail location. Right, that’s that’s sort of like the natural way that folks have been thinking about digital at home. But since it’s become easier to activate, right and measure the effectiveness, we’re actually seeing the increase in so many other carrier categories. Whether it’s like an embed event-based play we there’s a concert that’s you know, gonna happen, you know, over the weekend or the Super Bowl or MLB playoffs, you name it to your advertisers that want to do a consistent quarter over quarter by in the finance category, telcos retail government, I mean, you name it. So many of the campaigns that have been historically exclusive to online Display, Mobile and so forth are now you know, really starting to buy in and invest in in the home space. The only thing we observed is a lot of buyers who had been buying a lot of video and CTV are actually now extending those buys into digital out-of-home. And so you know, that 80% of our inventory right now supports video. And 70% of the campaigns that we see are actually video extensions of that same asset into digital home. So they, they were buying video, you know, online, or they were buying that they were buying video on a CTV environment, and they said, You know what, this asset actually would PORT really easily into digital home. And they’ll just take that same exact asset through that tag, and then push it into our, into our exchange. And so it’s become a parity play, it’s become a real great extension of other, you know, media channels. And we make it really easy for buyers to do that. Alcohol is another category alcohol brands have done really well because we’ve built a lot of technology into you know, venue management. So you immediate owners have screens everywhere, but they want to make sure that alcohol is only playing in areas that are over-indexing for you know, ages 21 or not, right LDA compliance is something that’s top of mind for for media owners and making sure that they’re adhering to all the local restrictions that might be in place. And so that our SSP allows meeting owners to manage at the venue level, any restriction, whether it’s politics, you know, cannabis smoking, you know, alcohol, whatever the case may be any sensitive advertiser category, they can decide whether or not any individual screen, you know, should be excluded from a particular category. And because that’s all built into the technology and our integrations with buyers, they don’t really have to worry about that. They can just upload their their asset and start to run. You know, those campaigns in the exchange without, you know, being concerned about showing up on the wrong screen for whatever reason. And so, I guess to sort of summarize a lot of this, a lot of that underlying foundation of technology that made these things that challenge so many years ago, is now you know, being bridged. And in a place now where it’s pretty automatic.

Matt (00:10:20)

And it’s, it’s interesting, you bring up the compliance piece, because I think that’s, that’s something that advertisers think about a lot is, you know, hey, I’m gonna run my ads, and I’m gonna do my absolute best to make sure that it gets in front of the right people, but I guess Yeah, with digital out-of-home, it’s out in the wild, and not something that you would have to be concerned about. And, you know, it’s interesting, you also brought up some more sensitive verticals. Now, were there any other verticals that, for any advertisers listening, you would recommend would be best suited for digital at home?

Chris (00:10:52)

You know, I think, instead of thinking about the vertical, one way of thinking about as a marketer is who is your audience? And does your audience leave the home during the day? Right? And the answer is probably yes. You know, people are, are doing all sorts of different things throughout the day. And a lot of their movement behaviour is routine-based, right? I mean, let’s be honest, humans are pretty boring and probably go the same to take the same way to work. Same way at home, dropping your kids off at school, picking them up at the same time, maybe going to the gym at the same time in the day, going a lot of the same places for lunch, right? we’re creatures of habit, and that plays out all the data that we see. And so as a marketer, you know, something to think about is I will, it’s less about what category Am I in and more about? Am I reaching my audience at the right place at the right time, so that I’m displaying relevant messaging, and I’m being really efficient about my bio, and targeting those locations where I think my audience is going to be, so that I’m delivering that on target message.

Chris (00:12:23)

A really good question. And, you know, it’s certainly something that I had no idea was even possible before I entered the space. You know, I’ve been in programmatic for a while. And the thought of being able to measure the effectiveness of out-of-home was actually surprising to a lot of folks who aren’t accustomed to how this works and digital at home, I’d be surprised to find that, we do have a pretty robust suite of measurement options for buyers. And we’ve got a great playbook on how this works. But essentially, what all this comes down to is determining whether you know, someone was exposed to that digital out-of-home campaign, we know, you know, where and when the ad is going to be played, we know all the locations of all the screens down to the lat long level in our network. So that’s great. And what we can do is we can use often GPS panel data, to see you know, what mobile IDs were within the proximity of that digital out-of-home screen when the ad played, right. And so this helps us establish who is actually exposed to that campaign. Right. So now you have your sort of exposed cohort, and you can take that exposed cohort and sort of compare it to a control group. And that allows us to do all kinds of great things around brand study, footfall. You know, looking at sales left, you know, we work with some great partners like IRI and for dayanita, ninthdecimal, Foursquare, a lot of great partners that are playing in this space, who have some really robust offerings around being able to measure the success of digital out-of-home. And in fact, we see about, you know, a third of our campaigns have measurements attached to it. So that’s a pretty, pretty big number. Thinking about how so many for so many years, we haven’t been able to actually measure the success of digital home the fact that, you know, we’re doing it on one out of every three campaigns, to me demonstrates, you know, how much the marketers really want to be able to measure it and how effective it is for marketers, once they are able to measure it to say, Okay, well, you know, I’m finding that this particular DMA is outperforming another I’m going to start to optimize my spend closer to one venue type versus another certain DMA. And, and that’s the power of programmatic being able to dynamically allocate media based off of what’s performing and then shift away from areas that may not be performing for the marketer.

Matt (00:14:46)

So Chris, just to bring everybody up to speed and really frame into into the marketing funnel. If we’re talking about top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, bottom-funnel, where does digital out-of-home best fit? And where does it deliver home best fit in your overall marketing strategy?

Chris (00:15:04)

Yeah, and I think really, this comes down to the the type of advertiser, and you know what category they plan. But we see that out of home as a place across the entire funnel. You know, e-commerce, for example, out of home tends to be about awareness and brand building, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to, you know, run that shoe campaign and make sure that, you know, we see how many shoes were purchased off the back of that particular, you know, out of home campaign, however, it does, you know, create that, that higher level awareness and brand building, and then bring people into that funnel, right. Whereas think of like a QSR, like, McDonald’s is really getting someone to convert that minute, right? How do I get someone to get off the highway, and then get to the drive-thru at McDonald’s, for instance, right. So very different types of advertisers and what their objectives are their call to action. And then point of purchase, right, being able to influence at the decision of moment of buying, I talked a little bit about, you know, grocery stores, convenience stores, you know, screens in, in that really desirable point of purchase location inside of a Walmart target, for instance, right? Those are exciting locations, to reach an audience when they’re, you know, in that moment of buying. And so it’s really about thinking about all the types of inventory that existed the job of home space, and say, like, Where does this play in that path to purchase? Right? Is this at the point of purchase? Is it in a contextually relevant location that might align really well? With you know, how the brands thinking about their brand perception? A lot of health brands do really well, they spend a lot of investment in in gyms, right? So we have some really great gym partners. Zoom TV is a great example of a partner that just aligns from that contextual perspective. Right. And so we’ve got tons of examples about that. But I would encourage, you know, the audience to, you know, dig, dig into it, and see, you know, what, what type of inventory we have out there in the market, and, you know, look at some of the case studies and some of the different ways that our home has been deployed, and, and of course, test and learn, right, that’s the beauty of programmatic we, we measure it, we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and start to, you know, optimize our spend over time.

Matt (00:17:33)

Fantastic. Now, Chris, I want to challenge you a little bit here to not just think about what’s presently going on with digital at home, or what’s going on in the near future, what 2023 looks like, but what’s happening with digital at home that is going to have a large impact in the next five years. And what are some emerging trends that we’re seeing that advertisers should be paying attention to?

Chris (00:17:59)

Yeah, and I think one of the cool things just for a moment, if we look back at what’s happened so far, is if you have a digital home media network today, especially in the US, and Canada, Australia, a lot of these markets that have adopted programmatic at high rates, if you are a digital out-of-home media owner, having a programmatic offering is table stakes, you have to be connected to this star, right? You need this in order to meet your revenue goals, right. And so, for many years, that wasn’t the case, right? You didn’t, you weren’t really able to activate and buy at home using a software platform like StackAdapt programmatically, that is no longer really the case. Now you can really have a single point of access to activate across basically the entirety of the digital out-of-home ecosystem. And so where do we go from here now that, you know, arguably, a lot of the pipes have been built, what we’re seeing is there that digital home is shifting away from being in that kind of silo to how do we integrate this into an omni channel strategy, right? How do we as a platform, you know, make the job of home really intuitive and make it easier for buyers to just click a button, upload their creative, just in the same way that they’ve been buying display, buy in mobile video, at the brand strategy level, right? It’s just totally integrated, incorporate it into an omni-channel approach, and not this sort of standalone thing in a silo. And, you know, those things are happening right now. We are seeing platforms, you know, start to build those capabilities, building their own planning tools, building those, you know, that connective tissue that eventually digital out-of-home is really no longer viewed as the separate thing, but really is incorporated. So I think that’s that’s one sort of pillar in my mind of what you should expect to see in the future. Now, I did say that we had you A great footprint from an inventory perspective. But to build on that there will be new inventory entering the marketplace, new formats, new contexts to engage customers, I would never have thought of an Eevee charging station as an opportunity to reach a marketer, or audio out a home in a grocery store in between when you know, PSA messaging is being played, to reach a consumer, you know, who knows what will be being next in the market, right? There’s, there’s a lot of ingenuity out there opportunities to reach your desired audience. And when there’s a will, there’s a way so I would definitely expect new formats to come up, and what those will look like, I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m certain that’s going to continue to be an area of focus. There’s a lot of new media owners that are entering the space, like I said, the cost of, of a display of you know, TV screens used to be so expensive, right. And, you know, it’s increasingly cheaper and cheaper to buy a TV screen or an iPad and so forth. And so you’re going to see more inventory, more media networks start to play into space, and it’s going to have some opportunity for diversification. And then the last sort of pillar, I would say, is really around creative. I mean, there’s, there’s been a lot of discussion, and buyers always have the question of like, what’s the right sort of creative approach that I need to take, and everyone’s going to be different, right, and especially, you know, national advertisers, folks that are buying with, across a whole swath of different locations and triggers and so forth, there’s going to be a lot more investment into the creative to make sure that the ad is high quality. The capabilities now like things like dynamic creative, are really emerging in the space. And that just wasn’t possible years ago. So I would definitely expect over time, a lot of these things that may be table stakes, and other channels become table stakes, table stakes and digital out-of-home. And and ultimately, what that means is it really just drives a new level of relevance for the customer right there. They’re going to be able to see better quality, better targeted advertising, something that’s more relevant, that’s going to engage them. And ultimately, I think the outcome is a more robust industry that continues to grow as a share of all the digital channels. So that’s, that’s what I’m thinking about. That’s that’s kind of top of mind for me.

Matt (00:22:22)

Awesome. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great episode. For any of our listeners, we hope that you took a lot away from this, we’re excited to see what you’ll accomplish in your upcoming campaigns. So until next time, this has been How Agencies Thrive podcast. Thanks so much for listening.

Episode Outro (00:22:38)

Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can us at StackAapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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