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 Alice Beecroft, Senior Director, Global Strategy & Partnerships, Yahoo Advertising.
How has your business developed since winning the award?
2024 was a busy year for Yahoo, with the launch of our creative AI solution Yahoo Creative, our partnership with premium publishers through Ozone and the first anniversary of our AI suite Yahoo Blueprint.
In the past few months, we’ve revamped our advertising business into Yahoo Ads and Yahoo DSP to better reflect our offering to the industry. Hot off the back of this, we also announced a number of partnerships at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, all shaped around giving choice and control back to advertisers by embedding transparency in the ad supply chain and improving curation for our DSP users.
How has your use of programmatic OOH developed?
We have been advancing our planning capabilities and expanding our market coverage for audience indexing, improving our ability to be able to plan ads based on local audience composition.
We’re continuing our focus on DOOH as part of an overall omnichannel strategy to improve the individual successes of each channel for mutual uplift in performance. In particular, we see great success in aligning OOH and CTV advertising thanks to greater oversight of local audiences and things like geolocation technology.
OOH has always been a natural top-funnel channel, but we are increasingly seeing it as a way of supporting lower-channel activity. In this way, OOH helps drive brand equity and act as a catalyst for mid-lower funnel actions.
How have you seen the programmatic OOH industry develop?
We’re starting to see programmatic OOH become more mainstream and no longer viewed as complex or specialist and therefore deployed more broadly. As a channel, it is becoming less siloed and able to not only complement outreach elsewhere but also take strong data sources to improve its efficacy.
We’ve seen a slow but steady increase in Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO) in programmatic OOH, and it’s only a matter of time before this ramps up. We see big upsides in how DCO can improve performance on other channels like social, and its uptake in OOH will greatly improve outcomes in campaign delivery.
Another area where advertisers are waking up to the power of programmatic OOH is through its deployment at major cultural and sporting events. Last year we worked with eToro on their Euros campaign, reaching highly engaged football fans on the ground with a specialised OOH offering.
What are you most excited about for programmatic OOH in 2025?
2025 is going to be a big year for in-store OOH. Retailers are already waking up to the power of digital screens within their stores as a means of improving sales, and as these screens proliferate, advertisers will quickly appreciate their impact too.
This coincides strongly with a growth in retail media data which will help us reach customers at the right time when they are right in the middle of making purchasing decisions.
What are the biggest challenges and how will they be overcome?
Standardisation remains a major challenge for the advertising industry, and OOH, particularly DOOH, is no exception. The strength in digitalising channels like OOH remains in its measurement potential, DCO and programmatic targeting. Without standardisation across the industry, we will not realise the full potential of these solutions.
As part of the IAB Europe OOH steering group, we are looking to standardise areas like measurement and attribution so that advertisers can understand and optimise their campaigns to the channels they use. We want to be able to validate that an impression from DOOH is a true impression to give better full-campaign visibility of how successful a piece of advertising is.
What has your most exciting campaign been this year, outside your winning entry!
eToro was a fantastic campaign last year as we deployed alongside the Summer Olympics in Paris. International travellers from around the world had gathered in France for the competition, which made a great environment for reaching engaged and excited sports fans with eToro’s core messaging.
Our results from this campaign surpassed expectations, with an 11% increase in investor registrations compared to our predictions.
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.