By Alex Mardikian

Digital out of home advertising has gained currency among brands. Out of home advertising is not new. It goes back to ancient times, since the days of the pharaohs and the kings of India. Billboards and ads on bus shelters are the most ubiquitous form of OOH advertising.

DOOH puts “digital” into the proceedings and makes the ads interactive and personalized. So, it’s not like one size fits all. The amount of information that can be disseminated through digital ads is much more. DOOH is easily customizable, the message can be easily changed for a given demographic or audience.

Rapid development in digital technology is giving us better screens and more flexibility with DOOH. These ads are found at airports, malls, cinemas, hotels, parking spaces and other places.

With the amount of data at the disposal of marketers because of smartphones and internet, it is possible to create targeted ads and DOOH serves as an ideal vehicle for these. The messaging is now more meaningful because companies can geotarget, use facial recognition and augmented reality to enjoy better engagement levels, and therefore better conversion rates.

Remarkably, interactive DOOH is an excellent information collection point for advertisers. As mentioned above, face recognition and geo-targeting are the two most useful and compatible technologies for interactive DOOH.

Since DOOH provides location data, it is a big improvement over traditional forms of advertisement. Advertisers can track consumer movement and measure the impact of campaigns. It becomes possible to assess store visits. Store footfalls are a vital performance indicator for many businesses. DOOH boosts footfalls and is a sensible investment for restaurants, malls, shopping centers, theaters, and such businesses.

DOOH uses technology to identify people who visit a store after interacting with Digital Out of Home advertising. It can inform advertisers of residential addresses. Businesses can target customers at this level of granularity.

DOOH can be connected to social media and can be programmed to send out a post, a tweet every time a given condition is met. This is great for advertisements targeting a broader audience.

But the real value of DOOH is that it enables advertisers to drill down, gather data, create accurate data sets, and then plan a sales approach that results in high conversion rates. Interactive DOOHs can get for you email IDs and mobile numbers. Digital standees are a type of DOOH that people interact with at airports, bus stops, etc and these serve to provide information and marketing feedback.

With DOOH, you’re giving the audience a reason to interact and you don’t really need a celebrity to model for you. There are savings here. Of course, luxury brands have always done great with showcasing their services and offerings through famous faces, and it continues even with DOOH. The medium allows for creative use by B2B providers and services. Generally, outdoor ads are the preserve of retail products and services, but no longer. Ease of placement and interactivity have meant that DOOH can be used by electric cable companies, industrial machinery suppliers, shipbuilders, consultants, chartered accountants…any business. Location is, of course, of prime consideration. A strategically located DOOH advertisement will draw engagements and provide data for nudging a prospect down the sales funnel.

B2B companies can reach the desired professional prospects through data-based and location-driven DOOH. There are always conferences, symposiums, and trade shows happening. By analyzing the patterns in footfalls, a campaign can succeed by targeting the audience at strategic locations and opportune moments. Something as simple as segregating an audience into small businesses and corporates and connecting this with their movements during a tradeshow can help boost brand awareness and sales by appropriate targeting of the two audience types.

Because DOOH integrates with the online world, it serves as an interface between offline and online experiences. It can send a person to a brand’s social media page or website, it can stimulate searches online, it encourages online interaction and information seeking, and all these can drive sales online or offline.

Big brands such as Google and Apple have endorsed DOOH. Google, in fact, has opened up its DoubleClick platform to OOH. With this, advertisers have gained access to the massive amounts of data at Google’s disposal.

Another aspect driving the growth of DOOH is that it is becoming easier to measure ROI for this form of advertising. This means that brands interested in a multichannel marketing approach and begin to add DOOH into the mix and estimate the kind of returns they will get. This will result in a structured and creative use of this technology for targeting prospects outside their homes, and continuing the interaction regardless of the prospect’s location.

Programmatic out of home advertising relies on historical and present data to flash the most appropriate message at a given point of time. Factors such as time of the day, weather, traffic, time of the year, approaching events, ongoing events, etc. are used to create and display the most relevant messages at any given time. Brands can opt to not display ads if the data suggests that the audience is too thin or incompatible with the message. With DOOH, the interaction ensures strong brand recall and over time it helps save on the cost of branding.

The real deal is the exciting partnership between digital marketing and DOOH. Developments in advertisement technology will invariably strengthen this partnership. Over time, the transition from an offline experience to an online one will become seamless and natural.