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. Next up is Mark Burton, Business Director, Skyrise, which won both Best Integrated Campaign and the People’s Choice Award.
How has your business developed since winning the award?
The award win gave us confidence that our approach to first party data measurement was absolutely on point. That has resulted in stronger relationships with our clients, as we collaborate really closely on projects. It has also allowed us to release bigger shares of budget in many instances, growing DOOH on plan as we’re able to prove our data-led approach is effective.
How has your use of programmatic OOH developed?
The campaign which won the award was one of the first campaigns which benefited from our media effectiveness planning tool, MediaPlan.ai – a key ingredient of Effective Audience Design and part of the where+when™ platform.
Since then we have rolled MediaPlan.ai out across 90% of campaigns, delivering on average 75% more audience for the same investment.
How have you seen the programmatic OOH industry develop?
Marketers are increasingly turning to programmatic DOOH buying, over direct buys. VIOOH’s State of the Nation UK report* recently shared that programmatic-only buys have seen a substantial year-over-year increase, accounting for 47% of DOOH campaigns in the past 12 months, a rise of 18 percentage points, and that 36% of media plans will include prDOOH in the next 18 months.
We’ve certainly seen that growth at Skyrise and we believe the increased measurement capabilities are significantly aiding uptake. Measurement isn’t standard within prDOOH, however we successfully measure over 90% of our campaigns, proving direct business results including increased sales and brand metric uplifts and we believe measurement of prDOOH should be the rule, not the exception.
When the client can evidence the direct impact, it makes it far easier to divert spend from other channels to OOH, reaching consumers in both the digital and physical worlds. It resulted in our prDOOH spend increasing by 90.8% year on year in 2024.
What are you most excited about for programmatic OOH in 2025?
When marketers understand that OOH is truly measurable, we anticipate increased integration of OOH as part of the wider channel mix, all working together as one cohesive and measurable campaign and taking further share from linear.
What are the biggest challenges and how will they be overcome?
The biggest challenges prDOOH faces is its audience of marketers still thinking and planning in a traditional way despite the digital capabilities prDOOH offers. This includes running DOOH in silo rather than as part of a wider channel mix, it’s essential we help marketers bust old myths and embrace the opportunity DOOH offers when it’s truly embedded in a wider media plan.
We also know the industry is wedded to old assumptions, rooted in linear buying, that simply don’t make sense. When you plan to the data instead of the status quo it opens up new opportunities to reach your audience with less wastage.
For example, you may assume buying train station sites will reach a business audience, whereas the data may tell you they’re huge foodies and actually your budget may be better invested at supermarket POS. Another great example is play rate – our MediaPlan.ai tool within the where+when™ platform has shown us that the 1 in 6 play rate needs to be analysed, it’s inefficient. With programmatic powers we can vary the play rate, and we’ve seen that a play rate of 1 in 12 still gives 90% audience reach.
What has your most exciting campaign been this year, outside your winning entry!
We’ve run a number of campaigns for The Dalmore, a premium whisky brand with a niche audience. One particular campaign was to launch a limited edition product, only available in Harrods for three weeks.
For maximum reach and impact, the client opted for London-centred DOOH supported by UK-wide Social, with particular focus on Terminals 2, 3 and 5 at Heathrow airport and hero sites including new location Outernet London.
Our MediaPlan.ai tool showed 32% of people passing the planned DOOH D6 formats would be within The Dalmore’s audience, and 33% would pass Hero formats, representing 2.5m impressions against a 383k target audience at an average frequency of 1.96, covering over 400 unique London screens, all indexing highly against the audiences’ non-residential location data. The tool also dictated the campaign pacing based on when the audience was indexing highest against the screens within the plan.
Skyrise data fuelled the Meta Social activity nationwide throughout the campaign period.
Highlights from the YouGov London Omnibus Study of 1000 respondents included almost 180% uplift in ad recall. The number of ‘The Dalmore aware’ users that had tasted The Dalmore had increased by nearly 40% amongst HNWI users and increases of purchase intent were recorded across the board – 158% of HNWI in store.
*VIOOH State of the Nation UK 2024
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.