The future’s bright for out of home advertising

By Jon Block

When I think about the long-term future of OOH, I can’t help but think about sci-fi. I really love sci fi. I love sci-fi books and films. Iconic sci fi film Blade Runner shows enormous out of home (OOH) holographic advertising creatives. Minority Report, a film based on the great book by Philip K. Dick, has Tom Cruise walking through a shopping centre being addressed by his name. The ads have knowledge of his purchase history and try to interact with him as he walks past.

Now, I don’t think the future of out of home is going to be as dystopian as Blade Runner or Minority Report, but I think we can learn a lot from it. These films show the prevalence and power of OOH advertising. As the technology becomes cheaper and more sophisticated, we’re seeing OOH advertising becoming bigger, brighter, bolder and in more locations, in more creative formats. The classic location Times Square in New York for example already has every format available. I anticipate that OOH will continue to be more interesting, with increasingly effective formats and more prevalent everywhere.

The other expectation I have is the volume and variety of data that we’ll have access to will continue to increase and evolve. It’s not going to be as scary as Minority Report, thanks to a greater awareness of privacy issues and legislation of GDPR, but there is going to be interesting usage of data, especially in spotting macroscopic patterns. We’ll better understand the effectiveness of the advertising and derive insights from both the advertising and people’s behaviour in response to the advertising.

Getting future ready at VIOOH

If I draw a parallel to what I’ve spoken about in the future, about OOH becoming bigger, better, bolder formats with more advertising everywhere, and more effective use of data, at VIOOH, we’re very much focused on this too.

In addition to accessing additional inventory, our goal at VIOOH is to increase demand. Historically, OOH has been a complex media channel to buy in the past. Well, this is really changing now. With global standards, APIs, frameworks, with systems like VIOOH that have to work across multiple territories across the world, we’re really standardising the way of buying. This is making it much easier to buy, it’s lowering the barrier to entry, and bringing in more demand, from new buyers to OOH or it might even be buyers who want to shift spend from other media channels that are less effective, like perhaps Display advertising. OOH offers them a unique connection with the point of sale that you don’t get in any other medium.

On the other side, VIOOH is very focussed on advancing its data strategy and providing more powerful tools for our media owners to understand how they’re selling their portfolio of inventory. We want them to understand how effective that advertising is, enable them to pass on that data to their buyers to help demonstrate the power of OOH and the impact that it has on the everyday consumer.

AI’s impact on OOH

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), I have a personal, quirky belief. It’s quite a playful one. I like to believe in the singularity. I’m interested in the fact that we are building self-improving AI that could become as intelligent as humans, or even more intelligent than humans.

In the short term, the impact AI will have on OOH will be around patterns in data. AI is absolutely incredible at spotting patterns in data. Whether it’s used in the medical industry or used in population studies, it is able to analyse vast swathes of data and derive meaning and insights.

I believe that’s how it will be applied to OOH advertising. Both from the data that we’re inputting into the system to help understanding the behaviour of consumers, their movements with respect to geography, and being able to better target the audience that the advertisers want to reach.

Across the data that we’re outputting, AI will help us forecast patterns in both inventory availability as well as also demand. It will help us understand how the demand side is using and buying the OOH inventory. This would empower the sales teams at the media owners with knowledge about how their portfolio is going to perform in the future, what kind of audience behaviours they might see, and how they might be able to package that up into something that is more meaningful for the demand side to buy.

This will benefit everyone, from allowing the media owners to package up more interesting audiences, to the demand side which will be able to access these audiences.

Jon Block is Chief Product Officer at VIOOH.

Source: VIOOH

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