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Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising, the category that most effectively reaches high value and contextually relevant audiences at scale, is about to achieve new heights in Australia in 2022. This is because two seemingly significant obstacles for media buyers – perhaps the last ones before we see mass adoption – have effectively disappeared this year.
Since our company started doing business in Australia in 2019, the most common challenges raised by media buyers have been: a) our ability to provide a programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) marketplace with inventory from all the major media owners in ANZ, and b) the ability to compare results between different providers using shared criteria. I’ll start with the latter.
Introducing a shared standard
Until recently, most media owners had been measuring impressions in different ways. The lack of standardised metrics made it difficult for buyers to accurately plan against campaign impressions and clearly determine which providers delivered the most value.
In fact, according to research by IAB Australia in 2021, one of the top issues that prevented programmatic DOOH advertising from being a larger proportion of advertisement volume was the lack of standardised measurement and metrics.
Looking to further stimulate market recovery, the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) recently launched Move (Measurement of Outdoor Visibility and Exposure) 1.5. OMA says Move 1.5 will introduce a standardised and accurate measurement for digital campaigns and a qualitative metric for digital signage.
It includes metrics reporting on reach, frequency, dwell time (based on environment, audience, and ad play length), and visibility, as well as the new ‘Neuro Impact Factor’ —which measures key moments that memory and emotion peak in the brain to evaluate the impact of OOH signs. Available since January this year, nearly all industry participants have now adopted this standard.
All the relevant DOOH inventory in one place
Building a programmatically-connected marketplace across digital out-of-home offers buyers a slew of benefits: flexibility, addressability, operational efficiency, reach and measurement.
Our vision at Vistar Media has always been to grow the OOH category and with leading partners such as oOh! Media, QMS Media, Val Morgan Outdoor, Scentre Group, Mediaworks, Vicinity Centres and many others joining the network, we are now well placed to further deliver incremental dollars to OOH. In order to fully realise the vision of audience-based buying, you need to have enough inventory scale to be able to buy media wherever the data tells you that your audience is. Now, anywhere that your audience is, there is a screen you can buy!
For media buyers, this represents a major update in terms of data-driven strategy. It’s also proven to be a major advantage for OOH operators who for the past few years have been converting fixed screens into digital. That investment needs to generate a return. A programmatic marketplace for them ensures that any inventory not sold directly by them will be auctioned on our platform so that it automatically finds a buyer.
Programmatic DOOH come a long way over the past three years with more than 350 brands across ANZ already using this category on a regular basis. Now that we have both highly engaged sellers and buyers, coupled with a unified impression multiplier and mass supply coverage, the table is set for pDOOH to now deliver on its true potential in 2022.
Ben Baker is the managing director APAC, Vistar Media.