What is DOOH?

If you’ve ever wandered past a mall’s digital directory, driven past a huge digital billboard next to a highway, or waited next to a screen at a bus shelter – you’ve likely encountered digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads.

Put simply, DOOH is any advertising on digital signage in areas accessible to the public. You may already know that more and more businesses are exploring DOOH in their advertising efforts, however, you might not know that DOOH operates on a programmatic basis. Programmatic means that every time ad space is available, an automated bidding process occurs between advertisers to show consumers their ad. Ads are shown based on user behaviour putting relevant messages in front of the right people at the right time.

DOOH allows businesses to run ads on a variety of digital screens consumers encounter in the wild, much like traditional billboards or signage. However, unlike traditional OOH mediums, digital screens provide flexibility in the number of screens an advertiser can place an ad on, and what kinds of consumers the business wants to prioritise showing the ad to.

 

What are some advantages over traditional Out of Home?

There are 3 key advantages that DOOH holds over traditional OOH mediums: greater geographic reach, enhanced targeting capabilities, and lower cost.

The flexibility of DOOH screens means that campaigns can easily be set up to display ads on screens in a number of different cities, provinces, or even countries with just a few clicks.

Further, the availability of screens in doctor’s offices, grocery stores, malls, bus shelters means that there are opportunities to reach consumers in more venues than a traditional OOH campaign. This also provides the ability to place ads in venues most relevant to a business’s products or services.

Given that ads on DOOH screens are connected to the internet, these screens have the ability to recognize what kinds of consumers are in viewing proximity to the screen at any given time. This opens the door for enhanced targeting capabilities that are impossible to replicate with traditional OOH. With this capability, ads can be targeted to specific audiences based on their interests, browsing habits, and based on places they have recently visited.. Whereas in the past, traditional OOH would cast a wide net by displaying the ad to everyone who passes by, DOOH screens are intelligent enough to identify what kinds of consumers are nearby and show them the most relevant ads.

Overall, this ability to target the most relevant audience for a business’s products or services makes for a much more efficient and effective use of advertising dollars. Traditional OOH signage is billed at a flat rate whether 100 or 10,000 people see the ad, but now, DOOH provides the opportunity to only pay when the ad is displayed on a screen and seen by the target audience. The end result is a much greater geographic reach at a lower cost than paying flat rates to several media owners for static signage all around town. Instead, DOOH allows you to only pay for the impressions your ad generates.

 

How can programmatic benefit your business?

DOOH is the next step in the shift towards applying programmatic advertising to a variety of different traditional advertising mediums. Over the past decade, we’ve seen an increase in programmatic audio advertising with the rise of podcasts and music streaming services such as Spotify. We’ve also noted that as TV’s are getting smarter, so too is traditional TV advertising. 

With smart (connected) TV’s now overtaking traditional TV’s in the homes of consumers, advertisers now have cheaper ways of getting on screens in the homes of their customers. In the past, it would have cost thousands of dollars to run an ad on TV. Now, with programmatic ads on Connected TV’s, not only is this medium significantly cheaper, it also provides advertisers with the ability to target consumers based on their browsing or viewing habits.

With ongoing product innovations in the digital space, mass impact traditional media vehicles are now within reach for every business. Contact Glacier Media to learn more.