The Australian Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising industry, whilst impacted by lockdowns in 2020, is according to PWC starting to recover. Whilst the impact of the current lockdowns remains to be seen, one clear development / opportunity for both advertisers and OOH providers has been the digitisation of the industry. In particular programmatic, which has been cited by PWC as what will play a major role in the industry recovery. Programmatic OOH is well suited to navigate the changes of consumer restrictions across Australia as it allows you to isolate audiences and geo locations quickly and accurately. Australia’s total out-of-home market – is worth an approximate $935.5M. A report from PWC has predicted the industry to grow to $1.95B by 2024.
In usual times programmatic out-of-home reaches around 93% of Australians each day and in an average week, around 11m Australians aged 14+ are exposed to digital outdoor advertising (Outdoor Media Association, 2020; Media4Growth,2019). These numbers are impressive and firmly position programmatic OOH as a viable channel option for marketers
Major screen owners and publishers in Australia such as JCDecaux, VMO, Tonic Health Media, Shopper Media Group and Scentre Group have approximately 60% screen coverage in high impactful locations such as doctor’s offices, grocery stores, malls, gyms, roadside billboards, gas stations and bus shelters – reaching audiences as they spend time outside of their homes. Up until now, there had been one major piece of the puzzle missing.
This brings us to the exciting news announced last week that oOh!media will make over 9500+ screens available for programmatic trading across AU and NZ later this year. Advertisers will be able to consolidate planning, activation, and reporting across all out-of-home publishers and formats. Taking programmatic enabled screen coverage to over 90% of the available market!
Advertisers are seeing additional value in delivering their OOH campaigns programmatically given they now have the flexibility to update, adjust and optimise their campaigns in real time as required, or dictated by the changes in the market. It also allows brands to take a data-driven approach to OOH, layering on signals such as mobile, footfall or weather data.
Sam Thompson, Head of Media and Partnerships at Bench says, “Brands can increase campaign efficacy and be flexible in optimisation strategy by shifting budgets to different locations, adding new venue types and screens as restrictions lift, and swapping in relevant messaging based on current circumstances”.
“Marketers can now include programmatic out-of-home as a part of their omni-channel activation, utilising programmatic technology to run targeted DOOH, and using exposure data to retarget consumers on mobile across different formats such as audio, display and native, creating a strong and efficient consumer experience”.
Bench is very excited to be part of this market development and look forward to helping our clients take programmatic out-of-home planning and buying to the next level.