Adtech – the real hero behind OOH success

This post is sponsored by Broadsign.

When it comes to out-of-home (OOH) advertising, everyone notices the advertising, but not many people think about the behind-the-scenes work that brings those billboards to life.

As all operations teams would know, a lot of work goes into executing OOH campaigns accurately, effectively, and with as much transparency as possible. This means operational efficiency is a key concern for businesses that want to consistently deliver on commitments to buyers and to maximise profits.

Achieving peak efficiency is easiest when an intelligent adtech platform is used as the foundation of an OOH campaign. We see this both in digital OOH, and in static, with specialised platforms in each niche solving unique problems for network owners.

With digital OOH, there’s a great deal of value in being able to display several ads, along with other content, over the course of a given time period. Delivering all of this advertising, however, is more complex than it might seem.

The right ads need to appear on the right screens at the right times, and for networks with many screens, building content playlists manually for every screen can take up a lot of time. It’s even more complicated when a buyer has a last-minute change they want pushed to their ads.

That’s why there’s such a focus on automation. By establishing rules about where and when content should play, scheduling becomes as easy as the network operator adding a campaign into the mix of what is meant to play.

The system ensures that everything is scheduled as it should be, saving the operator time to do more valuable work. This might be expanding a network, adding new capabilities, or working on new campaigns with other partners. And if a last-minute change is required, it’s a simple thing to just replace the old ad with the new one.

It’s worth noting, too, that cloud-based systems will also offer the advantage of delivering scheduled media to the screens automatically. Compare this with systems where playlists need to be manually synced, or even delivered and uploaded to a remote player by hand, and there’s an enormous amount of time to be saved.

Static OOH can’t get quite as automated, of course. At the end of the day, somebody needs to take the printed advertising and post it to a billboard, wall, bus, or other location. Still, adtech solutions have emerged that do a great job of syncing up everybody in the business and helping get every task finished more quickly.

For example, modern tools can be used to enter the key dates and times for various stages of campaigns, from design, to printing, to shipping, to posting, to removal. These automatically sync to calendars for the teams at each of those functions, automatically ensuring everyone works on the correct tasks, in the correct order, every day.

For teams out in the field, these tools will also indicate the places where different media need to be posted, and even track the date and time that jobs were completed. Having this information is a great tool for more transparency with buyers.

What’s great is that, for digital and static alike, these capabilities are just the basics. Adtech in the OOH space can also power amazing, dynamic and interactive content, streamline sales, and provide an easier pathway for static OOH businesses to digitise.

For any OOH business looking to optimise operating costs and maximise efficiency, the first step is clear: Invest in an adtech solution that will help you work and grow.

To learn more about how we can help your business grow and how our adtech software can help you power up your business, visit our website, or follow us on LinkedIn.

The writer is Rémi Roques, Broadsign’s general manager APAC.