Modern OOH Advertising Starts with an Effective Order Management System
In order to be effective, Out-of-home (OOH) advertisements need to stand out from their competitors. While billboards and digital advertising screens have a captive audience as people walk, run, bike, or drive by, they must be large, striking, and easy to read. Otherwise, their potential audience will simply ignore them.
Measuring billboard effectiveness is important to every OOH media campaign, however, without a live, centralized record of all locations, availability, bookings, content management, finances and campaign delivery, measuring effectiveness is a difficult task and much of your time will be spent on manual repetitive processes. Implementing a centralized order management solution offers benefits across your entire sales process. From inventory to asset owner management, all aspects of your out-of-home activities depend on having quick & easy access to where, how and what your outdoor displays are showing.
Inventory Management
Implementing a real-time, centralized solution for managing all activities and data that comes with out-of-home inventory management brings immediate benefits including improved process efficiency by removing manual efforts and the reduced risk of human error.
Take for example if you manage a portfolio of digital & static screens in shopping malls across the country, or even internationally. The inventory for each individual mall can be managed quickly and efficiently in ADvendio by assigning the relevant inventory for each mall within the system. This makes it easy to quickly identify the inventory you have available or already sold for each mall or site in an instant as well as gather historical performance data as required. Each location has its associated ad placements, ad types and the ad prices for each unit grouped and associated with the relevant mall.
Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home
In the longer term taking OOH advertising management away from spreadsheets and into a cloud-based order management solution also has the added advantage of connecting your digital inventory to automated buyers via programmatic digital OOH. This helps to future-proof your business while also satisfying consumer demands for granular, relevant ad targeting. To support this we just need to look at how the number of digitized outdoor displays is rapidly growing. From 2017 to 2019, the number of total digital displays in Outfront Media’s US portfolio increased from 1,693 to 7,266, according to its financial filings.
In the case of our shopping mall example, if you had a number of digital screens included in your portfolio it is also possible to link ad server IDs to specific ad units, to seamlessly engage with programmatic ad servers and exchanges. Like before the ad server IDs are grouped and linked with ad placement, ad type and ad price information for that particular location to ensure all information is easily accessible at any time.
Dynamic Advertising Content
Dynamic content is another growing trend that appeals to advertisers since the rise of programmatic DOOH as external data such as traffic, weather, or news info becomes a trigger for highly relevant content on DOOH screens. The digitization of panels and demand from advertisers for more targeted, granular purchasing combined with new dynamic content capabilities means that advertisers’ demands for relevance and granularity may become too great without a system in place to support the myriad of data required for these activities.
Coming back to your portfolio of shopping malls, if your digital advertising screens are populated with a number of advertising flips supported by a content stream such as a newsfeed you may need to pay a revenue share or payout per unit to the content owner as a part of your deals. With ADvendio this can be effectively managed with our payout feature to ensure this is a seamless and accurate calculation for each deal.
Media Owner Management
Paying asset owners or landlords is a key concern for outdoor advertisers as in many cases they do not own the screens or the property these screens are located on. This can be a very messy process without a suitable order management system (OMS) in place as large numbers of contracts and time-based payment agreements must be managed. Without being kept up to date on the key dates and times involved publishers may miss payment schedules and run the risk of damaging relations with a key stakeholder. Revenue share is a very common practice in this situation as rent, or a share of the advertising revenue generated must be paid out to the asset owner or landlord based on the number of screens, dimensions of each screen, or other metrics for a defined time period.
Sticking with the same shopping mall example as above, asset rental charges for Shopping Mall A in San Francisco, Shopping Mall B in Florida, and Shopping Mall C in Oakland must all be paid to different landlords, all based on a revenue share agreement. Shopping Malls A, B, and C can all be set up within the ADvendio system combined with contract terms, payment intervals, and the current stage of the advertising sales cycle for each unit attributed to the relevant location in real-time. This information for each unit is then assigned and used to pay out the correct asset owner. Simplifying all these complex variables into one automated workflow to ensure all payments are made on time and error-free.
Selling OOH Ads Depends on Demonstrating Value to Advertisers
OOH advertising is all about leaving an impression on your viewer with targeted, eye-catching content. As programmatic DOOH evolves, placing highly targeted and relevant content in front of consumers is getting easier, however, ensuring that you earn the greatest value possible out of your placements depends on how well you can demonstrate their value to your customers. By having easy access to historical performance information from each of your OOH channels you can instil trust in the minds of your customers that they can achieve their campaign goals and ultimately reach their target audience by advertising with you. Without a comprehensive order management system (OMS) in place, this can limit your ability to handle multiples of clients and hold back your business. With the future of advertising management centered around data of all kinds, this is a trend that is expected to continue evolving over time.
Originally published at www.advendio.com on August13, 2020
