(Credit: Box Digital, L’oreal, JCDecaux (Sandton City))

Programmatic has been around in digital for a while and now it is making its way to the OOH market as well. A new technology that not only streamlines processes but also introduces fresh avenues for leveraging the potential of this. But what exactly does programmatic bring to the table for out-of-home (OOH) advertising?

Real-time buying lies at the heart of programmatic. This approach involves purchasing inventory mere milliseconds before displaying an advertisement. Advertisers pay per play-out, with costs determined by the number of viewers. This real-time bidding technology revolutionizes OOH media buying in several ways, fostering greater creativity and efficiency in one of the oldest marketing channels.

It is especially the realtime buying component that can play such an important role for South Africa. South Africa is a highly diverse market with numerous media owners. Programmatic platforms can simplify the process of securing desired screens in real time. A significant advantage is the elimination of the need to individually engage with each media owner. Through a single platform, buyers can select and purchase across all screens.

The automation of programmatic opens the market to a wider industry of buyers. It offers flexibility, empowering advertisers to make on-the-fly adjustments without any budget restrictions. Consequently, it gives the opportunity for buyers to easily layer in advanced targeting, such as time, location, audience data or triggers.

A good example of this is how programmatic works along loadshedding. This is something that currently impacts a lot of the inventory and it has been hard for media owners to plan around that. Although this will not have an easy fix, programmatic buying could solve this problem partly for buyers. Real time bidding implies that the buying only happens seconds before the ad is being displayed. That means that if a screen would go offline due to loadshedding, it is not possible to buy any of the slots up until the moment it comes back online. And then automatically budget spends can be optimised on screens that are still active. In this way technology can be key to solving some of these issues.

Out-of-home advertising has always been about understanding the location where you are buying and the people you are showing the advertisement to. What is interesting about this space, is that now you also have the ability to use realtime data to even better understand the context someone is in. Weather triggers are frequently and effectively used, but you could also think about triggers based on traffic data, sports scores, pollen count, even flu infections and public transport times.

An advantage of the programmatic infrastructure is that it allows you to leverage data points to also inform your creative content. This could be as simple as showing the name of the neighbourhood in the ad to increase relevance to the consumer. Other examples would be to show the actual weather of an area or the nearest available store. From the studies that we

conducted, we know that making ads more relevant to someone’s context improves their attention and therefore you get more effective campaigns. Dynamic creatives allow you to do this on scale.

As a marketplace technology we need to ensure that everything within the marketplace functions perfectly, so that it remains easy to use. But at the same time we need to showcase and educate on the best practices we see in that marketplace, so that we can keep pushing the boundaries of what programmatic can bring. Ultimately to develop the overall industry and grow the brands that invest in it.