Jonas Glad
26 June . 3 min read . Opinion
(Credit: Doohclick)
It’s true to say that in comparison to other media channels, digital out of home has historically been slow to implement automation. Old habits die hard and that includes traditional purchasing and outdated selling models.
Surveys tell us that around 93.5% of advertisers (figure is based on global ad spend by medium) don’t currently spend their budgets on OOH. And then there are those businesses only using internal and point of sale display but not OOH retail displays.
Unduly cumbersome planning processes are one of the reasons why.
Now the big guns are discussing how they plan to reach 10% of all ad spend using the latest tech led firepower to make the OOH sector more appealing. But there’s no reason medium and smaller operators should miss out.
Simplifying the buying and planning process will help OOH owners and operators to tap into more of the advertising cake without increasing the administrative burden.
The key to driving demand for your sites is finding the right ad network management system which not only optimises your assets but eliminates silos, liberating your sales, marketing, adops and finance teams to work faster, better and more efficiently together.
In smaller businesses, teams are often wedded to legacy tools. The sales team have their own methods that are often built internally, while operations work primarily with spreadsheets and agency / customer communications are established manually. All of this not only creates an inconsistent customer journey but hinders the way teams right across your business collaborate.
At their most basic, booking platforms simplify the buying and selling process, automating repetitive tasks and the need to access multiple spreadsheets from different departments just to book a campaign or check site availability.
Most media owners now look to equip their assets with audience data to improve access to measurement tools and important audience profiling information.
And the modern CMS integrates automation with programmatic capabilities and is data driven to show how well a campaign is performing.
Connectivity matters and connecting your inventory to the wider DOOH marketplace makes it easier for users to find both static and digital inventory. Participating with other media owners within the DOOH ecosystem also allows you to unlock revenues that previously only the bigger OOH players could access.
Finally, media owners need to make sure their CMS is compatible with an HTML world. In fact you should be using HTML content capabilities by default, adapting your tech stack and operational processes accordingly to unlock the value of your assets.
Making the OOH purchasing process frictionless
That said there’s one big conundrum that has been creating a bit of a dilemma for South African operators and media owners.
Outside of South Africa, media owners and operators send pitches in their preferred formats to media buyers, planners and agencies who then integrate these proposals into their brand planning campaigns.
In South Africa, the reverse is true. Having struggled with the fact that they need to talk to anywhere between 20 to 50 media operators to confidently plan their OOH campaigns, agencies have made it mandatory for media owners to provide their proposals within defined agency templates.
This move puts the onus firmly on the shoulders of the media owners. And for those without a sophisticated CMS, and those creating proposals manually, the task is overwhelming.
We’ve discovered it effectively involves completing 18 different agency templates, each with their own format and different fields of information and required data.
The first thing we do when talking to clients is to identify the bottlenecks in their organisation. How are they doing things, how are they running sales. And this particular issue has been raised on a frequent basis.
Rising to the challenge, I am pleased to announce here on dooh.co.za that DoohClick has found a way to automate the entire process, effectively saving sales teams hours. And as far as I know we are the only Saas provider offering this functionality.
If we can deliver this sort of functionality in minutes, rather than a sales person spending hours, or days even, working on an agency proposal, imagine not just the time saved, but the ability to secure more ad bookings by going back to the agencies so quickly.
Equally, if a media owner wants a presentation in their chosen format, they simply upload their template and we can speedily populate it with the necessary data points. This is clearly something all of our clients can benefit from.
In short, the right ad network management system will help you save time, money and deliver more efficient sales.
On top of this, the right tech stacks are loaded with audience insights along with the ability to manage and connect inventory to demand side platforms, supply side platforms and ad servers to allow more targeted campaign planning and instant delivery to the right audiences and environments.
What’s more the right platform can be configured for each individual user, team or division within your business, providing access to the sort of real time information they need in just a click.
This level of access and functionality will eliminate current and potential gridlocks which are unnecessarily holding up business performance, putting you on the right growth trajectory.
Jonas co-founded DoohClick in 2019 after the Swedish owned proprietary ad platform was demerged from NASDAQ listed AdCityMedia. Originally developed over a 10 year period and previously operated as StarCorp, DoohClick provides global media owners with real time ad serving ecosystems which facilitate complete sales support, dynamic scheduling, improved analysis and fast reporting.
Prior to the formation of DoohClick, Jonas was chief operating officer of AdCityMedia AB. Having started his career there in sales, Jonas was instrumental in using the company’s progressive digital software to expand its acquisition trail, leading to its NASDAQ listing in 2017.
Under his leadership, DoohClick is now a fully independent company providing new business opportunities and updating legacy OOH systems across 11 markets.
It is Jonas’s vision to incubate an international network of like-minded collaborators under the auspices of DoohClick to introduce improved, common standards and support new and emerging technology across the OOH sector.