The foundational knowledge of programmatic OOH at the tipping point
To celebrate the launch of the second year of the JCDecaux Programmatic DOOH Live Awards this Spring, NDA caught up with last year’s winners to discover how their programmatic OOH business had developed this year.
First up is Hannah Scott, VP Client Services, Scoota.
How has your business developed since winning the Creative Excellence award at the JCDecaux pDOOH Live Awards last year?
For Scoota, the award was confirmation that what we’re doing has real value in the programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) space.
Since then, we’ve continued to enhance our platform—refining technical features, prioritizing accessibility, and exploring ways to better integrate pDOOH with our other channels to deliver measurable results.
We made the awards incredibly easy to enter, we thought. How easy was it in reality?
So easy! Although, there were several attempts at the video to avoid the cringe factor.
How has your use of pDOOH developed?
As a DSP, we see a wide range of pDOOH campaigns run through our platform.
Over the past year, however, we’ve noticed a shift from adhoc, experimental campaigns to more consistent, long-term strategies.
This suggests our users are recognising the value of pDOOH, not just for one-off opportunities, but as a flexible solution they can leverage whenever needed.
How have you seen the pDOOH industry develop?
What stands out most to me is the industry-wide focus on upskilling and education. For a while, one of the biggest barriers to pDOOH was a general lack of knowledge and understanding.
Now, it feels like we’re finally breaking through those barriers. As technology advances and new possibilities emerge, education will remain essential, but the foundational knowledge across the industry has noticeably strengthened. The JCDecaux pDOOH Live Awards, in association with New Digital Age helps with this knowledge sharing by providing a much-needed platform to showcase best-in-class pDOOH campaigns from across the industry.
What are you most excited about for programmatic OOH in 2025?
Measurement!
It’s a buzzword, and while there are already several options available, I’m excited to see how measurement capabilities will evolve over the next year—especially in terms of achieving greater standardisation.
What are the biggest challenges and how will they be overcome?
At Scoota, our key differentiator—and something we’re incredibly proud of is our ability to make dynamic, intelligent creative easy to build and seamless to deliver. However, there’s still a misconception in the industry that dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) in pDOOH is complicated, clunky, and unreliable.
Our biggest challenge today is encouraging brands and marketers to embrace the creative potential of pDOOH and to prioritise creative strategy from the outset of their planning process, rather than leaving it as an afterthought.
What has your most exciting campaign been this year, outside your winning entry!
It’s another creative-focused one for us, naturally. Over the summer, we worked with The Ivy to deliver contextually relevant ads around key restaurant locations, tailoring each message based on factors like real-time weather and walking distance to each restaurant.
We also measured footfall uplift, and the results speak for themselves: all the data-driven targeting in the world is meaningless without impactful creative.
To find out more about the JCDecaux pDOOH Live Awards 2025 – now open for entries – click here.
This article originally appeared on New Digital Age.