[Column] Remi Du Preez: Why digital marketers should be thinking pDOOH

While online buyers haven't had to do much hard work in convincing advertisers to direct a fair chunk of their adspend towards 'conventional' digital channels, the same cannot be said for digital out of home (DOOH) media.

Conventional’ digital channels channels allow access at scale as well as advanced targeting and measurement.

For advertisers, this means that they can serve advertisements to a pre-defined target audience, creating parameters that reduce the amount of media wastage and maximise bang for buck.

Driver absent for DOOH

On the other end of the spectrum, for DOOH, these same drivers were largely absent.

Historically, targeting at scale had proven challenging, due to the non-standardised way the DOOH ecosystem had been created.

In fact, targeting, in general, was reserved for those who had real BBE (big budget energy) as was activating at scale, due to the relative rigidity of loop-based buying. Finally, measurement methodologies were inference-based, and not rooted in any hard data.

This is not to say that DOOH didn’t have its place. For long, outdoor media was highly popular for its high-reach, high-frequency appeal.

What it lacked in measurability, it more-or-less made up for in larger-than-life presence. However, traditional digital channels and DOOH were seen as entirely separate buckets.

Digital dust

“But the times, as a boy from Minnesota once sung, “they are a-changing.”

Thanks to the advent of programmatic platforms that integrate with DOOH (known as programmatic DOOH or pDOOH), these barriers to entry have started to dissipate.

With reliable audience and tracking data included in the mix, DOOH can now be measured using the same metrics that make sense to a digital marketer.

But are these metrics identical? Not exactly…but close.

Consumers leave digital dust wherever they go – be it to a website, or a brick-and-mortar retail store.

For the digital marketer, this dust provides clues about the consumer’s mindset, which data aggregators capture.

Online media owners then use this data to serve ads to a consumer when they’re in the right frame of mind or amenable to purchasing a product or service.

In the realm of DOOH, different technologies and methodologies are employed to extract location, visitation, or search behaviour of consumers, but the data present in a manner akin to traditional digital channels, which means that the digital marketer can make sense of it, benchmark and report on it in a similar fashion.

pDOOH impact is powerful

And the impact of pDOOH is proving to be powerful – both in brand-building and performance.

Traditional digital channels have always been largely performance-focused, but low on brand.

Research from Kantar Media Reactions (SA, 2022) indicated that online channels were at the bottom end of building brand equity (<30%) – well behind DOOH which comes out tops (53 - 55%), only surpassed by Sponsorship.

In the same study, online presented the lowest level of brand recall (9% - 48%), while conversely, DOOH had the highest impact on brand recall (46% - 84%).

So, while online might be a digital marketer’s go-to, the growing level of ‘banner blindness’ and digital clutter means that they would be wise to start considering alternative channels to complement their digital campaigns.

In addition, according to a Rapport study, The OOH home of IPG Mediabrands: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, DOOH increases the effectiveness of online marketing when complimenting a campaign, with Search being the most improved (increasing by 80%), followed by social media (56%) and online (31%).

DOOH for brand equity and performance

We’re now able to track the consumer journey from exposure to purchase and we’ve proven conversion beyond any shadow of a doubt.

This demonstrates that DOOH is not only the medium to build brand equity, but also performance.

Now that DOOH screens can be accessed in the same way a typical digital buy would occur, marketers can apply both brand and performance metrics across DOOH campaigns, allowing for more cohesive measurement and substantially increasing the effectiveness of marketing budgets.

Furthermore, this inventory is available under the major DSPs that digital buyers already have access to, making buying easy.

Buying DOOH at scale

For digital marketers, this provides another channel that they can add to their current arsenal, that allows them to design high-impact omnichannel campaigns that live in the digital and real world, with all the tickboxes that you would expect from a digital buy.

Admittedly, less than 30% of all DOOH assets in South Africa are currently connected programmatically.

At Polygon, we’ve set out to change that, partnering with media owners and aggregating inventory to create a single-point entry into the largest DOOH network in Africa.

For online buyers, this will make buying DOOH at scale both easy and cost-effective, providing them with a true representation across the continent.

Remi du Preez is the Managing Director at Polygon, a programmatic aggregated digital out of home (DOOH) publisher network