‘Drive growth by offering more campaigns with digital smarts’

How DOOH can sustain its growth momentum and how much are technology and creativity contributing to the growth?

I’ve been a client and I’ve been a leader of  a legacy out-of-home company at Clear Channel. These experiences give very different perspectives on marketing which combine to show me the huge growth momentum for DOOH and give me powerful insights about how to drive that growth. I backed these ideas and put my money where my mouth is by founding Alight as a first-time entrepreneur. 

The vision and blueprint for Alight was to deliver ‘digital media in the public domain’, bringing a different attitude, tools and commercial structures to traditional out-of-home while nurturing strong partnerships with communities to deliver new audiences. 

We are now the market leader for monthly audience reach for roadside digital billboards (“D48s”), according to the latest Route release, at 31m people. This is more than X (Twitter) (19m), Tik Tok (23m) and Snapchat (24m) in the UK, showing the scale Alight alone can now deliver for marketers. 

According to Kantar’s latest Media Reactions report, marketers agree that DOOH deserves its high growth. DOOH is seen as the most innovative channel– especially as it “takes advantage of high screen resolution and fast-developing creative technologies”. This shows that marketers agree that our medium can grow further if it moves to digital-native attitudes, while understanding the differences of a one-to-many public medium (vs. online).

Across our network this year we have seen some great examples of dynamic campaigns that take advantage of the real-time flexibility of DOOH. We are also growing our portfolio to boost our full motion digital offering in pedestrian, shopping mall and hospitality environments. 

However, a frustration and barrier to growth remains a tendency in our industry to take high specification screens with modern communications and computers and simply run them as scrollers.

We can increase growth by offering more campaigns with digital smarts, driven by: 

1. Flexibility in scheduling because planning and buying platforms have more capability than ever before – to deliver solutions by time, location, impressions, plays, targeting or a combination of these. 

2. Goal-driven campaigns and data-driven media schedules using first- and third-party data via playlists rather than loops. At Alight we allocate time, share, impression and play based goals in our CMS and run campaigns for brands from a few hours of high frequency to multi-year commitments on low frequency.

3. Dynamic customised creative at scale, pushed even further by the growth of full-motion portrait networks.

4. Commercial models that align more closely with the goals of our advertisers. This will in turn provide more transparency through net pricing and private marketplace agreements that can be seen by participants.
   

Is programmatic DOOH bringing more business and are clients recognising the advantages of the flexibility and efficiency that it offers? 

pDOOH is bringing in more business, but it is still very early days. Done right, I am hugely supportive of programmatic to boost growth; but we have also seen examples of doing it wrong. In some countries we already see programmatic buying at scale, but in the UK it is still just green shoots. 

This is partly because of the UK’s buying structures; but also reflects a legitimate question from the market to some of the players: does your tech make the client’s investment work harder – hard enough to justify your fees? 

In some cases, ‘programmatic’ is still used as a work-around for legacy technology that is inflexible. pDOOH will only continue to grow our revenue if we are adding value to our brand partners, driving impact and improving marketing ROI.We will grow by asking ourselves whether we add more value than we charge.  

How is DOOH delivering in the context of omnichannel marketing and do you see bright prospects for retail DOOH?

DOOH is a brilliant complement to integrated media plans and is still the place that big brands land big ideas with the public in trusted environments. We work with businesses of all sizes to ensure their DOOH campaigns deliver on their objectives alongside other media channels.

We also see digital retail media as a high growth opportunity. In 2023, we launched a new digital retail media division to grow alongside our roadside business. The first launch is MiXR Media, an app and digital media network created through a shared vision with the Stonegate Group – the UK’s biggest pub company. We are aiming to enhance the consumer experience with the digitisation of physical retail, starting in hospitality.

Since launch, MiXR has become the UK’s largest digital hospitality network and the largest full motion network in the UK. The MiXR app has already achieved 800,000 downloads and counting. By the end of 2024, we will help brands target c.100m guest visits a year across more than 850 Stonegate Group venues.

Our ‘real world, social media’ offering also provides proven sales effectiveness, brand building, high dwell time and footfall. 

We believe physical digital retail media represents a powerful opportunity for advertisers to spend time and budget closer to the point of purchase. Our new division will not only help us deliver on our mission to build stronger connections with communities, but also bring new audiences and more data-led, flexible advertising opportunities to the market.

Out-of-home disciplines are great and necessary; but also limiting if we stop there. The potential of digital is to set ourselves free with a different mindset, a new set of models, and technology tools to make them happen. This isn’t just opinion: applying it in practice at Alight proves that it works.