When I was invited to speak at the World Out of Home Organisation’s (WOO) first Regional Forum in Africa, in Cape Town in early March, I decided to help the various players across our continent understand the critical juncture the digital out of home (DOOH) industry has arrived at, and the immense opportunity that technology has afforded us.
We’re on the precipice of exponential expansion – but we need to take the leap.
I believe that this juncture is not completely removed from the one we saw with domestic internet penetration a quarter of a century ago. In the 1980s, the internet was mainly the domain of government bodies, major corporations and universities.
It is almost unbelievable to think that, at the beginning of the ’90s, Joe Public (not the ad agency) had no real idea what the internet was or what it could do. By 1994, companies were starting to cotton on, and new online websites and commerce platforms were launched.
Within a year, new technologies were introduced, which expanded the internet’s capabilities, and the rest, as they say, is history. It boomed.
As we prepare for an omnichannel world characterised by multiple media channels, formats and touchpoints, we need to tap into this benefit of foresight, to take the best of the online world while avoiding its dark underbelly – and apply these lessons strategically.
There are three key things that the digital out of home industry can take from the rapid expansion of the internet.
Leveraging the power of the network
In 2000, the internet had 361 million users. Within a decade, this number had increased five-fold – but fast forward another 10 years and we hit 4.5 billion in 2020.
Today, 5.35 billion people use the internet, which amounts to 66.2% of the worldwide population. The reason it was able to expand so fast? A powerful network.
A research paper that set out to study the scaling phenomenon of the internet says: “Today’s internet is a prime example of a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system. It is characterized by an enormous degree of heterogeneity any way one looks and continues to undergo significant changes over time.”
What can DOOH learn from this? We need to tear down the walls between us – and scale.
Collectively, we have thousands of digital screens across the country, but our thinking remains too territorial and siloed. We need to examine how we can work together for the benefit of our category as a whole.
If media owners were to come together in partnership, aggregating their networks, we could establish a mega network that would extend our advertisers’ reach throughout the continent. This would create a powerful opportunity for brands to target consumers across the entire customer journey – with demonstrable results.
This is the premise on which Polygon was built. We partner with media owners to make up a network of thousands of screens, specifically designed to maximise omnichannel advertising campaigns while integrating accredited audience data using world-class technology.
We need to create a seamless experience for sophisticated digital marketers and a platform that allows us to compare apples with apples. This will remove the current ringfencing while creating consistency in audience data methodology.
Simplify and standardise
If you’re designing a banner or advertisement for an online platform, you have limited size and spec options, which are generally standardised across media owners. Yet when it comes to DOOH, we have multiple different specs and size formats, creating enormous headaches for the industry.
Why do this to ourselves? They don’t do it in Germany, Australia or most of Europe, where there are typically five different artwork sizes that fit 90% of billboards.
There’s also a misguided consensus that bigger is always better. When designing for a digital billboard, our advertisers tend to push the size of the creative as far as it will go – sometimes at the expense of the resolution. We should be thinking pixels, not meters.
If we want to scale, we need to standardise.
Transparency creates trust
In an advertising context and across all advertising mediums, measurement is our very bread and butter, demonstrating return on our clients’ spend.
In the world of digital, measurement is fairly uniform across the board.
Conversely, in our world of DOOH, it is also an area that sees a great deal of debate and contention around measurement methodologies applied, what data is measured, and how we represent these insights to our clients.
Sometimes I’ll see a billboard with one set of figures next to another with a completely different set of numbers, scratch my head and think, how is it possible that we haven’t got this right yet?
This is where we need to use the technology available to us and, as an industry, agree on our measurement methodology, data collection methods and the interpretation of that data – then do this uniformly and consistently.
We also need to be fully transparent in showing our methodologies and figures. Right now, have some good standards. However, subscription to these benchmarks is limited to members of certain industry bodies and owners of traditional roadside billboards. There are still myriad of screen venues that do not have any audience data attached to them at all.
Currently, the main problem with our existing measurement methodologies is how media owners are using and interpreting the data at their disposal. As media owners need to commercialise this data, this makes the whole process open to bias – at best – and fraud, at worst.
We need to step back and let the tools at our disposal automate this process for us, removing the risk of human error – and focusing instead on where we can add the most value: building strong client relationships.
The future is omnichannel. Not as we know it now, with poor integration between channels in creative campaign roll-out; rather, a seamless omnichannel experience for increasingly sophisticated consumers who want the world at a touch of a button.
As an industry, let’s reflect on the lessons of the past few years to guide our journey into the future.
Remi du Preez is the managing director of Polygon, an aggregated DOOH publisher network, specifically designed to maximise omnichannel advertising campaigns while integrating accredited audience data using world-class technology. Polygon offers advertisers a single point of entry into the continent’s largest network of DOOH inventory.
READ THE MEDIA YEARBOOK 2024 HERE.
