January 13, 2025
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising has been a thing for a few decades, but it’s only started to hit its real potential fairly recently. Programmatic advertising has transformed familiar digital billboards from glorified versions of traditional print ads into a precise marketing tool, fit for reaching modern customers. It does this by utilising advanced algorithms and locational data from your audiences’ smart devices to consistently serve relevant messages at the best times, streamlining your ad optimisation and ad-buying processes.
These capabilities put programmatic ads leagues ahead, not just to print ads but also to typical digital ads that usually run on fixed schedules. There’s no need to rely on manual negotiations and predefined contracts for placements as programmatic advertising platforms can be set up to respond to ongoing events and the proximity of individuals who are most likely to respond to your ad.
This barely scratches the surface of the capabilities of outdoor ads though. Let’s get into some of the more specific benefits that you can expect once you set up a programmatic out-of-home ad campaign.
Unlike traditional ads or legacy digital billboards, programmatic advertising allows businesses to target highly specific demographics using data-driven insights. As markets continue to develop and splinter into more niches, using programmatic ads ensures that your business can keep up with its customers.
Similar to online ads, programmatic ad platforms can go both ways. Aside from simply displaying your ad, they can be set up to gather real-time performance data, enabling your team to monitor campaigns and make immediate adjustments as they occur. This agility ensures underperforming ads can be immediately replaced with something better, further improving your return on investment (ROI) as well as your brand equity.
There are broader strategic applications as well. As programmatic ads are in the real world as opposed to virtual spaces, they can provide you with a much fuller picture of what your key customers are like. They can analyse location patterns as well as times of engagement and compare them against audience demographics. This may help you uncover deeper insights into customer behaviours and preferences that wouldn’t be available otherwise.
With traditional and legacy DOOH ads, it can be difficult to ascertain the true effectiveness of a creative due to the one-way nature of these formats. While there are some ways to determine the effectiveness of these ads, they often require time or expensive surveys. As a result, it’s not uncommon for the cost of these ads to balloon out of control, often with meagre returns.
In contrast, programmatic ads provide more insights into viewer sentiments right as they unfold, keeping you from overcommitting to subpar ads and enabling you to make improvements that engage customers. With such features as automatic bidding and creative optimisation, you can simply focus on high-performing segments and display your ads only when the right customers are close by. This can help you maximise your ROI by ensuring every dollar is spent on those who are most likely to engage with your brand.
Programmatic advertising seamlessly integrates your digital campaigns with real-world advertising, enabling you to deliver precisely targeted ads to key customers throughout the entirety of their journeys. These ads can be set up to incorporate technologies like geolocation tracking and IoT sensors to seamlessly connect online and offline ad exposures as well as specific online actions such as website visits or purchases.
In this way, a customer who visits your online shop can be served an ad for your business through an outdoor digital billboard as they commute to work or on smaller screens as they navigate public spaces like malls or transport hubs. Likewise, someone who has triggered a programmatic ad may also be served targeted content through their phones and other devices.
Whether online or in the real world, personalised, relevant ads always result in more engagement while keeping your sales prospects on the path to conversion. Even if customers don’t immediately convert, they are likely to remember your brand and keep it top of mind as they go about their day. This sustained brand awareness increases the chances of future conversions, perhaps enabling the creation of valuable brand advocates.
Programmatic advertising offers businesses unprecedented capabilities in real world locations, offering them the kind of relevance and scalability that was once only possible in digital ad campaigns. When wielded correctly, programmatic advertising can remove a lot of the risk and guesswork associated with outdoor ads with a data-driven approach that maximises one’s marketing budget.
Whether you’re comfortable with the high cost of traditional outdoor ads or simply want a more precise way of reaching your niche in densely populated areas, it’s time to give programmatic advertising a look. With its ability to bridge digital and real-world advertising, you’ll gain a depth of insight and reach that simply would not be possible otherwise. For the best results, consider using an agency that has experience leveraging this emerging technology.
