The World is Your Ad Slot: What are Digital OOH Ads & How to Launch a Programmatic DOOH Campaign in 2024!

Once being stalled by the strict restrictions of the pandemic, digital out-of-home advertising is visibly resurrecting in 2024. DOOH ads are proposing a refreshing angle of digital experience to the ever-growing regiment of banner-blind web surfers and device-fatigued remote workers.

Good news for digital OOH: due to the previously unseen regulations, the pandemic bitterly revealed how much we need outdoor activities and how tired we got from our devices.

Surely, in 2024, the infamous virus seems like a distant memory, but only now are we beginning to see its obvious consequences both in consumer attitudes and consequently, the ad tech industry.

Just for reference, around 88% of adults in the U.S. reported noticing some form of OOH ads in 2023. The digital OOH growth rate will stand at 11.5 percent in 2024, and the market share keeps growing in numbers you’ll probably never remember.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. People haven’t restored their pre-covid levels of activity (especially when it comes to adults) yet and regular Internet advertising is as strong as ever. What’s the future of DOOH and programmatic DOOH? What are their benefits? How does a marketer utilize their strong suits in the campaign? Let’s find out with examples!

What Is DOOH Advertising?

Before we dive into digital OOH advertising, let us look at its classic older sibling — out-of-home advertising, which has always been a strong tool in traditional advertising.

OOH includes all forms of advertising that consumers find outside of their homes. Some of the most popular OOH media include billboards, ads on street furniture such as bus shelters, transit-based advertisements in the airport or the subway, posters in sports arenas, shopping malls, and more.

OOH does not necessarily mean that it has to be outdoors. It simply means that you see the ad in a location outside of your home.

By definition, DOOH media ads are OOH ads that use digital screens instead of static billboards and are placed there via digital advertising platforms.

Digital OOH vs. OOH: The Winner is Obvious

Digital-out-of-home and regular out-of-home bear the same goal: to grab the attention of a passer-by and introduce them to a specific brand. If being placed in a specific location, they may also lure the person into a physical shop and therefore increase sales of that venue.

Yet, one of them is placed on a chunk of paper, metal, or plastic, while another sits inside the digital screen. So, here are the obvious differences:

Placement Price

At first sight, traditional out-of-home offers a relatively cheap placement. However, things change once you simply imagine all the operational costs the business pays to physically replace the ad to change the message.

The initial cost of implementing DOOH media is relatively high as well, but the ROI is also higher with lower operational costs, varied content, and increased flexibility in campaign creatives. DOOH can be instantly replaced and adjusted to the place, time, and event.

Targeting

As for targeting, it's based on a pure guess in regular OOH. No historical data is available because there are no targeting algorithms except for the brains of the “billsticker.” Before each OOH campaign launch, media agencies, and brands analyze locations and make conclusions based on their individual experience or focus groups, in the best case.

Programmatic DOOH campaigns allow for a data-based approach to targeting since advertisers can use mobile location data to define real-world movement patterns of their audience. Mostly, it's anonymized GPS data that shows which locations the user visits frequently, thus concluding their interests.

You build audience heatmaps and start targeting users at specific places and at a specific time. If a screen in a preferred location is available, a demand-side platform will programmatically bid on impressions on that screen.

Should we say that the superpower of digital OOH here is retargeting? It may be impossible to target ultra-precise audiences with out-of-home creatives, but retargeting is a wonderful option. Geofencing is the top choice here: you show the ad on a DOOH screen in a certain location and then retarget people within a 100m radius on their mobile.

Measurement

We can’t compare DOOH vs. OOH in terms of performance. With regular out-of-home advertising, measuring results is nearly impossible. Unless you mount a micro webcam behind each billboard and then manually count each pair of eyeballs staring at the ad.

The answer to how to measure digital OOH effectiveness is still yet to be fully understood. But, the location data here comes to the rescue again. Location data companies utilize GPS, Wi-FI, and Bluetooth technologies to collect data points and then provide them to the advertisers.

Digital out-of-home programmatic platforms may generate reports based on these data points, count impressions, and provide some inventory forecasting.

Benefits of Digital OOH Advertising Over Other Digital Channels

While the internet and popular social media platforms are massively saturated with digital advertising, DOOH campaigns stand out. The novelty and charm of fully virtual ads are gradually reducing since mobile screens have long integrated into people's regular lives.

DOOH campaigns, with their creative combination of traditional and digital advertising methods, have become attractive for brands to use. Here are the advantages of DOOH technology for both users and advertisers:

Better Reach-Quality Ratio

Hyper-relevant digital ads based on behavioral targeting might work best for conversions. OOH campaigns always performed well in increasing brand awareness. Well, digital OOH combines both: it allows you to apply targeting to an extent and provides better campaign reach.

What’s more, DOOH technology perfectly complements the digital mix of web, mobile, and social media channels. It was found that combining regular digital campaigns with OOH can increase overall campaign reach by up to 300%.

Can’t Be Skipped

In 2024 everybody knows about the # 1 issue of digital advertising. You see, 62% of people on Earth are avid ad skippers. At least, 32% of Internet users are using ad blockers. And with the amount of ads that get poured into our brains every minute from our screens, most of us have developed banner blindness.

With large format DOOH, you simply can’t “unsee” an ad with a real-life ad blocker.

Nuff said: even if you wanted to get close and skip or scroll, DOOH screens intentionally lack screen sensors. Users will be glued to the IRL screen (or at least give it a glimpse) until the ad ends, as it occurred with good old linear TV advertising.

Security and Privacy Compliance

Even though DOOH utilizes location information, it does not use any personally identifiable data to target the user. Digital OOH almost completely relies on the context, bypassing the need to know people’s identities, which is achieved by gathering 1st-party data or asking for consent required for 3rd-party cookies collection.

Surely, Google won’t ever get rid of third-party cookies, but everything that doesn’t dig in your laundry for data gets huge trust points from common folks, making digital OOH advertising so much more effective.

Perfect Place & Day-Parting

The idea of promoting business products near its physical store with OOH signages, posters, and leaflets is as old as the hills. Moreover, marketers of the past were quite good at linking places to the audience, e.g., subway to job seekers, office elevators to coffee drinkers, or highways to families looking for new home furniture. DOOH media levels up this idea, transforming it not only into a well-placed ad but also a timely ad.

The ad appears on the screen when the target user is most likely around, thanks to the dynamic nature of DOOH. Utilizing big data, advertisers define the best time to show the creative and “book” screen time for their campaign.

Digital OOH example: we have a DOOH screen at the shopping center entrance. The language school, gym, and billiard club are located in the same building. Among several creatives to show, we prioritize them this way:

Common Drawbacks of Digital OOH Advertising

DOOH is not only pink and rosy. We should be honest: it’s the least optimized digital advertising channel.

Moreover, it’s not cheap and requires a lot of investment to be implemented on the technical side. Measurement of digital out-of-home performance is the trickiest part, which wins here only over regular OOH attribution, which is basically non-existent.

So, let’s elaborate on the digital out-of-home possible drawbacks:

High Placement Prices

An average digital out-of-home inventory CPM is at least 10x higher than those for digital display and 2x higher than programmatic video advertising CPM. Such a drastic price increase is associated with high maintenance costs. Unlike display banners or videos displayed on the user's PC, DOOH media requires serious investment to install and service hi-tech screens.

Moreover, digital out-of-home programmatic is still only gaining momentum, and not that many supply-side platforms support DOOH inventory now. Thus, many DOOH placements are still managed directly, which usually implies higher CPMs than for automated media buying.

Measurement Complications

It’s hard to say how views got your digital OOH creative since it is shown to a group of people at a time. Even though we can relate to mobile location data and the number of the alleged bypassers, we still can’t be sure that each of them has noticed the outdoor ad. Analytics provided in this case is a rough estimate, which is better than nothing (as with regular OOH).

Yet, the industry is on the way to finding a consensus for programmatic DOOH performance measurement and adopting facial recognition technology to make it more precise.

Not Suitable for Performance Campaigns

You can’t skip the ad = you can’t click on the ad = you can’t convert the user. The undeniable fact: DOOH as a sole advertising channel is fabulous for spreading the message but horrible for turning a user into your client. Effective programmatic DOOH campaign is always a part of the cross-channel advertising strategy and goes hand-in-hand with further user retargeting.

So, What Businesses Benefit the Most from DOOH Advertising?

As you have probably noticed, companies that hold colossal market capitalization in their respective industries, such as Amazon for retail, McDonald’s for food, Apple and Samsung for tech, and Nike and Adidas for fashion, utilize out-of-home advertising the most. They are leading users of the innovative digital OOH advertising campaigns.

The fact that they have used DOOH in their advertising strategy proves the relevance of this method in maintaining a strong brand presence. Also, DOOH is quite demanding in terms of the size of your pocket, so it is big brands that can afford it now and take a real edge off it. Let’s cite several examples.

5 Outstanding Digital OOH Examples in Real Life

# 1. eBay

Weather-based DOOH advertisements by eBay detect the weather conditions and showcase products or services that appeal to the weather. The retail giant uses the OpenLoop platform to receive and process real-time weather data and fine-tune campaigns accordingly.

E.g., “The sun is shining, your garden can too.”, “Gray sky, perfect time for DIY.”

# 2. GMC Automobile

GMC Automobile launched a digital OOH campaign that detected the age, gender, facial expression, and level of engagement of the viewer. All thanks to facial detection technology built into the screen powered by Quividi, an audience measurement platform that helps to define and categorize pedestrians with video reports and smart analytics algorithms.

# 3. Douwe Egberts

“Bye Bye Red Eye” — the name of the DOOH media promo launched by Douwe Egberts coffee. They used facial analytics to detect when tired and sleepy late-night passengers yawned and offered a free coffee at the O.R. Tambo International Airport in South Africa. It was one of the first applications of basic facial recognition on out-of-home campaigns.

# 4. National Geographic

“See what we can #SaveTogether'' digital OOH campaign by National Geographic allowed the public to take a picture with a digital banner that showcased various endangered animals and projected chosen images on digital billboards.

The scale of this campaign was impressive: over 45,000 digital screens were installed throughout the US, including Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

# 5. Lancôme Paris

“#ShareaSmile” digital OOH advertising campaign by Lancôme Paris was dedicated to International Women’s Day 2017. They used facial recognition software to count the smiles of the bypassers, donating €1 for every smile captured.

What are the Pricing Models for Digital OOH Advertising?

Aside from paying for ad placement, in DOOH media buying you also pay for maintaining premium physical real estate such as smart billboards, POC displaces, kiosks, and the like. Therefore, advertising rates for a fully-fledged DOOH campaign would be higher than for traditional digital and traditional advertising methods.

There are several ways DOOH media inventory is usually priced. You can select your preferred pricing model depending on your budget and total impressions goal.

CPM — Cost per Impression

This is perhaps the most commonly used pricing model for digital OOH campaigns. CPM (cost-per-mille) is the rate you pay per thousand impressions on your ad.

Note: since it’s impossible to count the exact number of impressions, the CPM calculated for DOOH campaigns is a rough estimate based on the location data. Also, it includes maintenance costs publishers should pay to service the placements, thus being much more expensive than regular online ads or OOH posters.

SOV — Share of Voice

With a share of voice or SOV, you buy a certain percentage of the ad inventory offered by the publisher in a particular location. A typical digital billboard has eight slots in a loop, each 8 to 10 seconds long. An advertiser receives ⅛ SOV when all of the inventory is sold. To gain a larger SOV, advertisers can buy multiple slots within the same loop.

How to Implement DOOH in Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is all about taking the human involvement and error out of advertising. It uses the RTB protocol to run inventory sales in real time, matching the publisher’s inventory to the advertiser’s creative and targeting preferences.

What Is Programmatic DOOH Advertising?

Basically, digital out-of-home programmatic advertising is all about combining the programmatic ad tech stack to serve DOOH ads more effectively.

In theory, such an approach should let the advertisers adjust campaigns on the fly, and optimize ad placements based on factors like weather, time of day, or audience movement.

However, If you sign up for any demand-side platform on the market, don’t expect that you’ll be able to serve DOOH ad formats outright. Most programmatic platforms on the market are still tailored to serve traditional digital ad formats, e.g., banners, video, native, pop-ups, etc. Most of them partner with supply-side platforms that provide only desktop and in-app inventory.

But once the choice of the platform that supports DOOH media is made, running a campaign is no different from buying any other media on the demand side. Some features like inventory forecasting, accurate media planning tools, and proper attribution may not be available. 62% of advertisers name the lack of inventory consolidation as another problem.

As for the sell-side, publishers utilize digital signage software to manage out-of-home devices and the content itself on top of the regular stack.

Some SSPs that offer a full programmatic stack for serving digital out-of-home units may have it in an all-in-one integrated system for publishers.

Programmatic DOOH Ad Formats

However, it won’t be possible to serve the same creatives on other channels since DOOH ad placements have far too different specs from regular ones. These ad formats include:

• Large format. Digital billboards that have dozens of meters in width and height. Large-format ads are usually found on highways and in high-traffic industrial, commercial, and metropolitan areas. They require ultra-high resolution of the creative due to their size.
• Spectaculars. High-impact video ads are shown mainly in the downtown crowded areas and provide a rich experience. It might require even more resources to be created due to its dynamic nature.
• Venue-based. Medium-sized DOOH media creatives with a high contextual value. These are usually shown in airports, shopping malls, office buildings, gyms, and other high-traffic venues.
• Custom format. These may vary from screens of the unusual shapes to rich media units equipped with the touch screen so the user can interact with the ad. These are not available for RTB sales due to their high complexity.

Programmatic DOOH Best Practices

The programmatic path to purchase is rarely limited to DOOH-only engagement unless you advertise the physical store within its 10m radius.

In most cases, it will require an extra effort to convert a bypasser into a lead. So, the best practices here would be:

1. Define the target audience and make up the right message;
2. Pick the right programmatic DOOH software with access to media owners you’re interested in and data integrations that will allow for the type of targeting you require;
3. Set up the platform, upload creatives, and launch an awareness campaign solely for the DOOH media channel;
4. Receive analytics from the campaign and use mobile location data to form the segment engaged with your advertisement;
5. Apply advanced targeting techniques (e.g., geofencing, contextual, behavioral, etc.) to retarget the users on mobile or desktop through a retargeting campaign;
6. Run another DOOH campaign in the area where your users are most likely to convert.

Programmatic DOOH Advertising: How to Solve the Main Problem

The issue you may stumble across from both buy- and sell-sides is the lack of industry standardization and, therefore, the inability to use a single platform effectively. Advertisers may not be able to access multiple media owners through one DSP.

Publishers may fail to comply with different SSP requirements since there is no common standard for DOOH inventory.

Here is the solution: white-label software. This concept means you buy technology from an ad tech provider and customize it as your own platform.

What’s more, you can request custom development of the tools you lack. It will be much more affordable than developing a platform from scratch since you already have a core functionality.

Owners of the white-label DSP may connect custom SSPs to work with. From the perspective of our article, you will be able to consolidate DOOH supply partners in one place, yet you will have to dig into the technical side of the RTB. If the platform lacks support for digital OOH advertising formats, it’s possible to pay the provider an extra fee for developing this functionality.

The same can be implemented from the supply side. Publishers may buy a white-label SSP technology and connect it to custom demand-side platforms without bothering to meet the non-unified requirements of each self-serve SSP separately.

How to Measure DOOH Campaign Performance

We’ve already told you: the primary industry concern to date is DOOH campaign performance data attribution. Now, let’s see which accomplishments in the field of digital out-of-home programmatic attribution we currently have.

The key performance metric to measure here is the number of impressions. The most common method is to process mobile location data and define if the person could see the ad. Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) released a set of guidelines to follow while measuring impressions using location data.

The key takeaway is to introduce the required:

The key takeaway is to introduce the required:

• Input variables from venue data, e.g., screen visibility distance, latitude coordinate of the screen, average dwell time, and direction the screen is facing.
• Input variables from user movement data, e.g., longitude, latitude, timestamp, and advertising ID.
• Input variables from ad play data, e.g., duration and display time.
• Output variables depending on the use case.

To capture exposure in outdoor locations, we might use precise screen location to define the number of impressions.

Here, the direction the screen faces and its viewing distance are the key variables to compare to the user’s phone location and movement direction.

For example, a west-facing screen is viewed by the consumer traveling east — that’s one impression.

To measure impressions in indoor DOOH media locations, we use both precise screen location and centroid of the venue location since most visitors tend to dwell in the indoor area rather than just pass by.

OAAA also defined the output data required for attribution. The project differentiates between data needed for retargeting (usually just the advertising ID) and full-on attribution, where the advertiser wants to know the complete set of metrics.

There will be more exposure capture techniques standardized in the future. For example, facial recognition is among the top DOOH trends, yet it’s not officially approved as a standard method to measure digital OOH advertising campaign performance.

How to Launch a Digital OOH Campaign With Epom Ad Server

A large number of DOOH ads is still served directly. Here, advertisers partner with publishers and negotiate the placement price by talking to each other. They may sign a contract, which states when, where, and how the ad will be displayed on a certain screen.

To run and optimize this kind of a campaign, both sides use a custom ad server for digital out-of-home ads. The platform allows serving any OOH ad format in digital advertising since it doesn’t have any restrictions to comply with a specific DSP/SSP, requirements of which are currently far from being unified. Everything depends on your agreement with your partner.

From the publisher’s side, you’ll have to set up a non-standard placement within a designated zone and site:

Then, you should find the invocation code for this placement generated by the ad server. But unlike with digital advertising, when the ad tag is naturally triggered while the user visits the website, DOOH screens should use a different trigger to get the ball rolling.

From the buy-side, it’s simpler. First, you create a banner for a non-standard placement. As Epom doesn’t have any templates for DOOH media ad formats, we’d recommend you picking the local file or whatever option you’re going to use.

After it’s done, you can link your banner to the previously created DOOH placement. Once you launch the campaign, this banner will be displayed on the linked placement based on your prioritization and targeting settings.

FAQ: 1-Min Glance at DOOH for Busy People

• What Does DOOH Mean?

  DOOH stands for digital out-of-home, and means ads powered by digital technology are shown to the user in public places rather than on their devices.

• Is Digital OOH Better Than OOH or Digital Advertising?

  DOOH is better than OOH in targeting, measurement, and relevancy. It’s, however, much more expensive than traditional outdoor advertising. DOOH media might be better than regular digital ads due to its higher capacity to attract users and grab more attention, yet it succumbs to digital’s more potent ability to convert.

• What are the Benefits of Digital OOH Advertising?

  The significant benefits of DOOH are high audience reach, unskippable nature, high potential for contextual advertising & day-parting, privacy compliance, and no need to use cookies for targeting.

• What are the Drawbacks of Digital OOH Advertising?

  Drawbacks of DOOH are poor conversion rate, need to retarget DOOH viewers on other devices, lack of measurement standardization, and high placement prices.

• What Businesses Benefit the Most from Digital OOH Advertising?

  Large-scale brands that have enough resources to advertise big and invest in innovative technology. As for industries, consumers expect to see DOOH messages from major retailers, food & beverage companies, fast food chains, health services, automotive, insurance, technology, and financial services.

• What Kind of Messages is the Best for DOOH?

  Types of OOH screens messages consumers find most useful are:

  • 42%: special offers and promotions
  • 29%: announcement of new products
  • 25%: company’s services and business hours
  • 21%: company’s website or social media information
• Which Pricing Models Are Available for Programmatic DOOH?

  The most common one is CPM, where a thousand impressions are estimated using mobile location data. Another one is share of voice, where the media buyer pays for the ⅛ part of the “loop”.

• Which is the Average CPM Rate for a DOOH Media Ad?

  Average CPMs for DOOH vary from $9 to $32, making this channel one of the most expensive in the digital advertising ecosystem.

• What are the Most Common DOOH Media Ad Formats?

  Large format aka digital billboards, spectaculars aka dynamic videos on the large screen, venue-based medium format ads, and a variety of custom rich media formats.

• How to Measure Digital Out-of-Home Programmatic Performance?

  The most common method to measure DOOH campaign performance is collecting and processing mobile location data and comparing it to the data inputs, e.g., distance, screen direction, dwell time, etc. The industry is also experimenting with facial recognition technology.

• Is It Possible to Buy DOOH Media Placements Programmatically?

  Yes, if the DSP you use support DOOH ad formats and the SSP you buy from offer such traffic. At this moment, advertisers find it difficult to consolidate all DOOH buying in one platform, since there is still a lack of standardization in platform requirements. Thus, we recommend using white-label software, which allows for custom SSP connections and custom setups.

• How to Launch a Digital OOH Campaign with an Epom Ad Server?

  You can launch any campaign regardless of the format and digital channel with Epom. To serve DOOH, you should set your banner and placement as “non-standard” and integrate the server with your digital signage software.