Out of home (OOH) advertising provides brands with a versatile creative canvas that can be used to amaze and delight large audiences in a variety of ways in premium locations. From large-scale installations to 3D anamorphic designs to interactive screens – the creative potential of OOH is dazzling. Meanwhile, programmatic capabilities enable brands to display digital out of home (DOOH) ads to smaller, data-defined audiences during specific moments. However, it saddens me that in some cases, the selection of a programmatic route to market results in a loss of creativity. That simply doesn’t have to be the case – pDOOH offers brands a multitude of creative opportunities that deliver wide-reaching benefits.
Programmatic doesn’t equal robotic
Data-driven audience discovery results in unrivalled, real-world insights into consumers. Who they are. Where they spend their time. How and when they move between different locations. How they behave. What motivates them? These insights, in a pDOOH context, don't apply to individuals but that doesn’t make them less relevant because pDOOH is a one-to-many channel not a one-to-one channel. These insights, integrated into a demand-side platform (DSP) or trading desk enable media buyers to allocate budgets for optimal cost efficiency and optimise campaigns in real-time using intelligent technology.
But what about creative? In an online scenario, personalisation is often achieved through adding more technology solutions that create thousands of ads supposedly tailored to individuals. In pDOOH, solving the challenge of personalisation at scale requires human input to create ads that work hand in hand with your media goals, messaging strategy, and chosen technology partners. This isn’t a time consuming or resource-heavy task and should be viewed as an opportunity to streamline processes and optimise performance, not a burden.
What does the creative process look like in pDOOH?
First off, you need to identify the key data points (or triggers) that create opportunities for creativity. These signals could come from a brand’s first party data, e.g. product sales data by location, price vs. competition, and social sentiment or from third-party data e.g. weather, news and current affairs, and footfall. Once you have a clear view of the data signals you will use and how you can best adapt creative to best meet consumer needs and match their motivations in each scenario you need to test the resulting ads.
Solutions such as VIM, JCDecaux’s AI-driven creative testing tool, or System1 provide you with predictive analysis of how likely your ads are to attract consumers’ attention and therefore generate the desired outcome. These insights can be used to create final versions of each iteration of your ad, ready for testing in the real world.
Working with a specialist in dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) and your media owner partners ensures that scientific methodologies are applied to your creative testing and optimisation and that the results you see are statistically significant. You can expect granular creative insights and analysis, and real-time optimisation based on your campaign goals.
Creativity doesn’t look the same for all brands
Consistent and controlled: For established, scaled, global brands creativity revolves around consistency and flexibility. Personalisation is likely to be based on geographic area, especially for brands with physical locations. For bigger brands selling more expensive products, e.g. automotive manufacturers and luxury retailers, there may be a longer than average purchase cycle too that requires consistent, controlled, effective creative that speaks to the needs and motivations of specific audiences. In these scenarios, the number of creative variations per market may be relatively small and success should be measured using metrics like cost per lead, footfall, and engagement.
Real-time updates: Travel, hospitality, retail, and service industry brand’s advertising and sales performance are highly sensitive to even small changes in price, availability, and other consumer trends. Additionally, these brands often have a relatively wide target audience. This presents a challenge when it comes to showing consumers the right ad based on their location and demographics. Integrating relevant data feeds into your DSP e.g. price or Google Maps footfall data enables brands to update creative in real-time to show the most popular or competitive product in a specific area or show up-to-date availability, or simply reach consumers only during times when footfall to your store is low.
With this type of dynamic creative optimisation you should expect a high number of creative variations, however, due to the immediacy of consumer action measurement can be more akin to online channels e.g. cost per sale and return on investment.
Motivation-based: Consumers buy the same products for different reasons, especially in the FMCG space. For example, one person might buy a moisturiser because of a particular skin condition, whereas others may be more motivated by nature-inspired fragrances. For pDOOH buyers this represents an opportunity to test multiple creative variations across different audiences based on demographics, affinities, precise skin need states and climate triggers. Robust multivariate testing enables marketers to deduce how to most effectively deliver the right product mix and drive awareness of key product proof-points that would resonate for each of their target sub-segments.
Once again, this type of DCO will result in a high number of creative variations and requires integration of sales data into the measurement process to evaluate effectiveness.
Why brands should get more creative in pDOOH
There are many benefits to being more creative in pDOOH. Firstly, more thoughtful data-driven creative results in performance uplifts across brand and direct response metrics. Secondly, once you’re familiar with the process of generating data-driven DCO strategies campaigns can be up and running very quickly enabling you to react to consumer or external trends and increase contextual relevancy boosting performance further, without the need to re-design and re-traffic creative. Finally, doing more with your creative generates additional insights that can be fed back into future creative development across all channels.
This article originally appeared on The Media Leader.