Digital OOH advertising has allowed for modern, sophisticated, software and media broadcasting opportunities. In particular, marketers are most interested in the possibilities offered by digital advertising screens. Modern digital advertising screens offer an abundance of new broadcast’ opportunities, enabling the OOH industry to become much more sophisticated, measurable and seamlessly integrated into cross-channel advertising campaigns. Digital outdoor screens when combined with online advertising and other cross-media ads such as paid search and social media are shown to boost mobile searches and digital engagement. Key to this from a delivery point of view has been the advent of automated trading platforms in the OOH advertising sector which have significantly lowered the threshold to entry and manual management involved. As a result, OOH media has now become efficient & cost-effective to purchase due to the introduction of automated processes and workflows.
The digital OOH advertising market is poised to grow by $ 3.78 billion during the next four years at a compound annual growth rate of 4% between 2020 and 2024. This highlights to publishers the value of an omnichannel sales approach, combining a mix of digital, streaming, outdoor and digital outdoor inventory offerings for OOH publishers to drive better results for end-customers and most importantly, advertising revenue for your business. Research from the oaah has shown when OOH advertising is combined with other media types, it can increase reach by 18% for TV and up to 316% for mobile advertising.
Once the right systems are in place to align the multiple disconnected systems required to streamline the placement & serving of multiple deals across digital media channels, OOH publishers can offer complex omnichannel advertising packages with real-time information on product availability, cost and projected reach all at the click of a few buttons. In order to effectively combine your advertising inventory and align customer campaigns across multiple channels such as online digital, OOH, and DOOH there are a number of challenges that arise. From managing vast amounts of data generated and effectively coordinating sales and ad operations departments we will highlight some of the key challenges facing OOH publishers in effectively managing cross-media ad sales.
Cross-Channel Inventory Management
Selling advertising inventory across a number of channels is a complex and time-consuming task without a software platform in place to access accurate and timely inventory data so that customers are presented with available options when it comes to campaign planning. With inventory availability, quantities and prices changing on a daily basis, keeping track of this fluctuating information would often take a dedicated team of ad ops specialists working specifically on inventory updates to satisfy needs. Keeping track of inventory availability across multiple channels and sub-locations without an order management system can easily lead to overbooked inventory. This is due to outdated or incorrect data with multiple spreadsheet versions being stored and circulated leading to inconsistencies and errors in ad product availability. The problem for OOH publishers in today’s data-driven market is that one bad interaction can negatively affect customer relations and ultimately damage recurring sales.
Consolidation of Ad Placements
Placing deals to multiple SSPs can also be a frustrating task as OOH publishers must meet specific requirements for each SSP to enable multi-platform deals in a fragmented market. Doing this manually adds extra complications and effort into managing each inventory placement required for an omnichannel campaign, and further complexity in ensuring all the required inventory is bought for the correct dates to meet customers’ agreed campaign plans. For large campaigns, it becomes a difficult and time-consuming task to manually manage the placing of inventory to each relevant SSP, which is something that can be easily managed through pre-defined templates with the right system in place.
Utilizing Data from Multiple Disconnected Platforms
As briefly touched on above, the modern advertising ecosystem is highly fragmented as a result of innovation over time. Ad servers and exchanges, data management platforms (DMP), analytics tools and more have all been developed to help transact and quantify advertising sales activities. However, without having a central source of truth to access and interpret this information the efficiencies and value are lost to manual data entry, spreadsheet management and data normalization & validation. For OOH publishers, implementing a cross-media advertising management solution that can easily integrate into external platforms including ad servers, exchanges and DMPs allows all data to be synced and centralized in one system for use in each stage of the ad sales process to increase operational efficiency and post-campaign reporting accuracy. Having this information readily available on-demand allows ad operations teams to focus on extracting actionable intelligence and value for customers as opposed to spending hours on data extraction, alignment and analysis.
Effective Cross-Media Ad Sales For OOH Publishers
By implementing an effective cross-media advertising management platform it becomes easy for OOH publishers to automate downstream manual processes including invoicing and payouts. Cross-organisational communications can also be added to your system as workflows to ensure relevant departments are notified at each stage of your sales process. This ensures that each team member has immediate access to the relevant information at each stage of the process and allows staff to predict and manage workloads most effectively.
By streamlining communications and removing manual repetitive processes your entire team can easily deliver cost-effective campaigns and drive customer success. Combining this with the ability to offer accurate and timely data on their cross-channel inventory performance to advertisers helps your entire process to run more effectively and accurately driving customer retention and advertising revenue in the long run, which will cover any initial set up costs involved in no time.
Originally published at www.advendio.com on August 26, 2020
