In an exclusive interaction with MediaBrief, Maanesh Vasudeo, Senior Vice President — Media Operations at LS Digital, discusses how pDOOH (Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home Advertising) is fast becoming a game-changer in the rapidly evolving landscape of advertising through automation, audience-based impression delivery, and real-time targeting.
He delves into the benefits of pDOOH over traditional methods of OOH advertising that struggle to keep up with tech-savvy consumers, and examines how well Indian advertisers are embracing and adapting to it. Vasudeo also discusses how LS Digital is incorporating pDOOH and effectively solving the challenges faced by it. Read on.
Give us an overview of Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home Advertising (pDOOH).
Programmatic digital out-of-home advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital out-of-home inventory through a DSP (Demand Side Platform). It is considered a much more efficient and cost-effective way of buying and selling advertising space between the advertiser and the OOH Inventory owner.
Buyers will set the terms in which they want to buy media, and when those terms are met, ads are purchased automatically.
pDOOH helps place our ads beyond digitally enabled devices like mobile, CTV, laptop, etc., by targeting outdoor placements where the ads cannot just be served digitally but circulated as and when required, while we have a visibility of the real-time ad serving.
How does it address the challenges of traditional methods of Out-of-Home advertising?
pDOOH is an enhanced version of OOH and plays an integral role in driving innovation within the industry. Essentially the concept of pDOOH is the same as DOOH, an ad is delivered to a digital screen in real-time, however, the ad bought, sold and/or delivered is different.
pDOOH has automated the process of buying, selling, and delivering inventory across digital screens and offers enhanced capabilities to traditional OOH and DOOH. When going with traditional OOH placements, we usually don’t have a real time visibility of the ads being placed in terms of duration and dimensions/sizes.
This can be solved when we target Programmatically enabled DOOH screens. We not only get to track the impression volumes, but also the transparency on cost per impressions and the screens via latitude-longitude coordinates. Further, we have the option of pausing or extending the duration on-the-go.
What is the current adoption rate of pDOOH advertising among brands in India? Are there any statistics or trends available that highlight this adoption?
Current adoption rate is in lower single digits of the brands overall digital spends which is very minimal, however with better access due to pDOOH, multiple brands are subscribing to DOOH, even those who didn’t have OOH in their plans earlier.
One opportunity is the growing reach and impact of DOOH advertising. DOOH ads are now being placed in a variety of locations, including airports, malls, metro stations, and bus stops. This gives advertisers access to a large and diverse audience.
So, as we speak more and more screens and OOH inventories are being made available on DOOH, due to this gauging the growth here (in terms of numbers) becomes a bit difficult. But someone closer to the OOH inventory ecosystem may be able to help with a better view of this.
What are the challenges faced by brands in pDOOH advertising and how is LS Digital addressing or tackling this effectively?
Few of the challenges include trust on efficacy of brand awareness campaigns, cohort segmentation within pDOOH, etc. While setting the right objective is important, measuring the efficacy of the branding campaigns via OOH becomes a major challenge. Especially because it doesn’t have a standard digital metrics way of measuring numbers, like mobile advertising or video advertising.
So, the industry is working together to find a middle ground in getting the best of both worlds, OOH and digital. So how do we solve these challenges? – We at LS Digital believe Transparency is one of the important aspects when advertisers are investing their digital spends in a property like DOOH, so, we make sure to route all our pDOOH campaigns via a DSP to have a complete control over the deliveries and tracking the numbers with real-time dashboards.
We have also enabled Brand Lift Studies, that help analyze how the brand’s proposition is received within the exposed user group. We also have DMP enablement in place, that helps capture the exposed device IDs (MAID) via Beacon technology (any devices that come within a predefined vicinity of the OOH screen). These users or devices can be retargeted to push for consideration.
From your experience, how comfortable are agencies in India to embrace and incorporate pDOOH in their campaigns? Have you witnessed any specific trends in pDOOH advertising?
Since pDOOH is a relatively newer concept added in the list of buying inventory through a digital medium, advertisers or brands are excited and often provide test budgets to try this, however they are currently not investing a large amount of their digital spends in DOOH.
With the growing trend, awareness and capabilities of measurement, the trust factor on this inventory is increasing YOY, quite a few brands are adopting this medium where they can reach masses by placing the ads on an OOH space.
At times, the brands want to choose a cost effective OOH inventory available while ignoring the important part of tracking the ads and keeping transparency on the execution.
However, this challenge is now being resolved via a DSP route owing to the capability of capturing the devices and allowing live dashboard tracking which can be plugged to a DSP for retargeting to reinforce the brand’s perception within the masses.
How is pDOOH posing itself as a game-changer for the industry in the Out of Home Advertising Space?
With OOH having a digital touch, one can see the result of curating much better, and bigger campaigns, with dynamic and targeted campaigns with real time optimization and data driven insights.
DOOH is effectively proven as a game changer in digital space and larger than life screen space has effectively proved a boon for brands to showcase their products or launch with reaching out to all types of audience while they commute. DOOH space around coffee shops and apartments have helped the brands to reach out to users while making an impact via a digital footprint.
With digital getting into newer environments like CTV and DOOH which were earlier available only through offline channels, the digital campaigns can reach out to masses seamlessly and in a quicker way.