Part I: Standardizing Digital OOH Advertising While Building Network Efficiencies and Accountability
Digital OOH has come a long way in terms of measuring audiences and the effectiveness of advertising on network screens, but still needs to evolve further for brands and agencies to allocate significant media budgets to digital destination screens. The ultimate question is: how can brands truly assess their digital destination investments within a fragmented landscape of screen inventory, and throughout various verticals and units of measurement?
In this series of posts, I’d like to explore the many facets of standardization in digital destination advertising: how digital OOH analytics can begin to provide value metrics, how brands can leverage existing information, and how networks can evolve their platforms to build more value in a meaningful way for marketers. More importantly, this series explores how brands can make sense of all the disparate information brought about by a fragmented industry.
Erik SaaS wrote about new creative tools launched by agencies and other companies in order to organize the vastness of place-based advertising in this blog.
What’s interesting is that we see a whole industry approaching the same challenge from so many different angles, which I think is mostly beneficial for growth because everyone wants to help out and make this industry blow up, but we certainly have to accept the growing pains associated with it. It’s also interesting to see the responses for these initiatives of standardization, like the various responses about OVAB’s rebranding initiative and their pulse on the marketing intelligence that will hopefully help to give the industry its accountability wings.
There have been mixed reviews about the existence of the organization since its formation but now that they have repositioned themselves to reflect the flexibility of the space as a sophisticated communication platform, and also to establish stronger thought leadership with brands and agencies. They have rebranded themselves as the “Digital Place-Based Advertising Association”.
The DPAA’s objectives have not changed since the rebrand and launch of their new site, as they strive to create efficiencies between brands and networks. Their primary objectives are to continue to standardize audience metrics and the standardization of creative units while activating Nielsen and Arbitron research. “We try not to publish information about initiatives until we have them done,” says Mike DiFranza, “In this industry, it’s all about managing expectations and credibility.”
The DPAA has created the AUA to measure audiences and the effectiveness of place-based campaigns, while networks scurry to smash together numbers based on assumed traffic, loop strategy, and advertising exposures per day, week, month, etc.
The problem is that even though various entities in the industry mean well, their unique approaches and diverse pricing methodologies still create so much confusion for brands and agencies, that advertisers simply put a halt to any of their digital OOH initiatives in order to attain a better understanding of their potential media investments and the overall potential opportunity in scope. This just delays the tipping point even more.
Layers upon layers of metric confusion that create obstacles, not pathways of opportunity. Don’t get me wrong. I do not discredit the AUA metric whatsoever, in fact, it provides an excellent foundation and basis for many campaigns. But I think that it is a perfect example of why metric agnosticism is the only pure form of standardization.
The AUA is only one piece of the puzzle. Even though agencies are well on their way to adopting this methodology, smaller networks are being forced to become more efficient in adopting the same quality assurance practices in the way they sell their inventory. This is an advertising sales issue and again, all networks tend to approach this in many different ways.
In a way, it is ultimately the networks responsibility to educate the brands and to speak in a language that everyone can understand. However, many networks need help. That’s why we’ve created our platform. This is the value that Entourage brings to the table. We aim to make good networks great and smaller networks sophisticated enough to deliver audience metrics and accountability elements that brands care about, in the way they care about it the most.
How? By treating digital OOH for what it is: a robust, flexible, and scalable digital communication platform.
In Part II, I will discuss solutions through which disparate metrics can start to make sense for brands in a unified way, evolving network platforms into accountable metric systems, and how we can start to use Digital OOH Analytics in a meaningful and systematic way–no matter what kind of metrics media planners and marketers are using.
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