In September this year, as part of JCDecaux’s promise to provide ongoing education about programmatic DOOH (pDOOH) we hosted an event for independent agencies to gather and share learnings from recent campaigns. In this piece, Nadia Di Vuono, Associate Director, JCDecaux UK shares key takeaways from a panel discussion between Cameron Cumming, Director of Performance at John Ayling and Associates and Tommy Gleadell, Activation Director at the7stars.
Cameron and Tommy have a wealth of experience in pDOOH. Earlier this year, together with audience design and targeting platform Skyrise and The Woodland Trust, they won Best Integrated pDOOH Campaign award at the JCDecaux pDOOH Live Awards. The campaign has also recently made the shortlist for the Best Use of Data and Creativity award at The Wires.
What are the main learnings you have taken from recent pDOOH campaigns?
Cameron: “Less is sometimes more. It’s easy to become enamored with the opportunities that pDOOH gives you, but you can get too carried away.”
Tommy: “Have a clear process for creative delivery to avoid confusion with different formats, agree optimisation points in advance – at what point to move budget, what good looks like etc., and ensure that the client is clear on what to expect.”
How do you know when to use pDOOH compared to a traditional buy?
Cameron: “It can be exceptionally handy on smaller budgets where there isn’t an obvious geographic focus. I firmly believe that it’s less about ‘’versus’ traditional buys and more about ‘as well as’ traditional buys. It comes back to OOH’s strengths are mass, the more we leave that behind the worse off OOH will be in the long term. We find it useful to reinforce a wider message to a particular audience whether that’s geographic or demographic; and to make a modest campaign feel bigger to specific audiences.”
Tommy: “Programmatic is a great route to market to add an extra layer to the campaign to drive some incremental reach or add a high attention-grabbing layer – e.g. activated based on a topical outcome, e.g. politics or sport and super-charge engagement.”
Top take aways from the discussion and audience Q&A:
Think of pDOOH as part of digital programmatic strategy rather than traditional OOH. By using data and intelligence from other digital channels pDOOH can drive performance across the whole campaign.
The flexibility and ease of use of pDOOH makes it straightforward to test and learn with data and creative, and you don’t need huge budgets to do this.
Just because pDOOH is data-led doesn’t mean it has to be robotic – there are lots of ways to be creative and stand out with exceptional contextual relevance.
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