Digital Signage Today
00:08:18 · Adam Malone
[00:08:18] S2: I'll maybe take it a slightly different way. David and I had a chance this year to travel to France and go to the Cannes Festival for Creativity. And I met more creatives than I have in the entirety of my career. It was, you know, there are influencers, creative content generators, folks that work at creative agencies, you know, and they're there celebrating the creative advertising work that was put on display at the festival. And to a person, conversation, you know, what do you do? What do I do? And so, you know, I had the chance to talk a little bit about the space that we love, you know, out of home media, this giant canvas, these incredible touch points along the customer journey. And it was really interesting to see and hear from the creative folks about how exciting it is for them to be able to play in that space. Hey, I only get a chance to do this four or five times a year, I wanna make sure I'm doing it right. Do you have any advice for how I can utilize? Because most of the work that they do ends up on a really small screen. And now they can come and be in particular places and spaces, they can be around certain events where a bunch of their audience or target audiences are all there and all together and experiencing the same media together, which is just sort of awe inspiring to them and sort of just seems so normal to us, but it's not like that in other media. How many people can you fit in your living room? Super Bowl ads are like a $100,000,000,000 a second or something now, and it's because there's 30 people watching altogether. It's like, that's what our space does every single day. That's what we do in the subway every single day. That's what people do in malls, etcetera. And so really thinking of it from the advertiser, from the creative, how can I engage with my audiences in the real world with a large canvas? What can I do to be able to leverage that? And it is a little bit expensive to do it at scale. There is a little bit of friction there, but it's like the stakes are high, so they have to really put the time into develop the right creative that fits in that space. And when they do it and it happens and it's done really well, it is so impactful.
00:10:49 · Adam Malone
And that's why you see all these creative campaigns blasted throughout the internet once they show up on Sunset Strip or they show up in Downtown Nashville or Austin or a place where this experiential or this digital activation took place. So I really love, yes, the technology, yes, the data, yes, a lot of this stuff is getting cheaper and more pervasive in these cities, but that just creates so much opportunity for creativity and for engagement and for sharing. I just, man, if we can just get more of these creative types to try it and learn and see the success and see the amplification of it, I just think that's one of those things that'll just create an incredible flywheel for the industry.
00:11:38 · David Weinfeld
[00:11:38] S1: Yeah, and I would add that when you look at out of home in The US, it is 2.5 pennies of every media dollar. What that essentially means is that there's an enormity of spend that's going to channels like social, online video, display, now CTV audio, that are getting the lion's share of dollars. And when you think about how memorable, impactful out of home is and really digital out of home and the type of dynamic creative opportunities to Adam's point that are available. But also it is really about elevating and educating the buy side and helping them understand that thanks to platforms like Vistar and PlaceExchange and BroadSign and Perion, that it's now easy to buy. It's easy, really more easy than it's ever been to identify the right type of inventory against your target audience, and even more so being able to measure the impact of that. We work with a great partner in ADCS Insights, where you're actually able to do sales lift at scale in a economically affordable way. And so when it comes down to it, digital out of home can be seen as both an incredible brand awareness channel, but truly a performance channel in the eyes of digital buyers. And when you think about the sea of sameness that exists within the likes of Instagram or Facebook, or how forgettable a mobile ad on your phone is, start then contrasting that with a 100 inch four k HD screen in a residential lobby or in your doctor's office or on the corner of 5th Avenue. And that's when I think brands will truly see the overwhelming opportunity that exists within our channel. And our hope is that, you know, we can elevate our network partners and really elevate the whole of industry so that we can get more of that 2.5¢ and continue to fight for our fair share of that media dollar.
00:14:07 · Judy Mottl
[00:14:07] S0: So is the measurement aspect, which is getting better, obviously, one of the challenges still facing the industry?
00:14:20 · Adam Malone
[00:14:20] S2: Yeah. Yeah. And if we had more than thirty minutes, I think we'd dig into, we'd hit this from multiple angles, but I'll say something maybe controversial, which is, you know, we're gonna get the measurement solution or the audience and an impression solution that we pay for. And I think a lot of the, you know, I think a lot of the agenda around Geopath and Purview and these other things is kind of missing the point, right? It really, you cannot expect an industry wide universally accepted platform and dataset for $10,000,000 or $5,000,000 or $2,000,000 in annual committed support. That same $100,000,000,000 in spend that's going into what we call traditional digital or digital display or online video, probably 10¢ of that dollar goes into verification and targeting. And so, that's $10,000,000,000 of paying for the data efficacy of that media. That's the scale of investment, right? It'll be relative to our, you know, maybe 10,000,000,000, but there's no reason, like if we wanna really do this right, and make it so that The US out of home industry is not a $10,000,000,000 industry, but a 20 or 30, it might take a billion in spend, in committed spend. And how you do that with the various business models, the way they do it in programmatic digital is that it's built into the CPM. It's just part of what you pay for when the advertiser spends a dollar in the system, 10¢ of it goes to buy the dataset and get the verification done. I think that's reasonable, right? I think that's reasonable. And if we really want innovation to come in, if we really want entrepreneurs to come in, spend tens and tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars cultivating these data sets and really, really at scale, then let's let them make some money. Let's let them make two X, three X on their investments in these systems. I haven't seen the big guys want anyone else to make money, any of the new entrants into this space to make that level of money. So I'm a little reticent to see that happening, but that's the kind of a bold idea around measurement that I think if we allow ourselves to imagine a future that looks different than the present, we are all investing a tremendous amount more, in order of magnitude more, at least in data and measurement, if we wanna go and compete and win at the higher levels.
00:16:59 · David Weinfeld
[00:16:59] S1: And from an outcomes and campaign measurement standpoint, I believe it's one of the largest misnomers in the entirety of the media industry's perceptions around out of home. You can measure it. You can measure it very effectively. You can measure closed loop sales lift. You can measure purchase intent. You can look at exposed audiences and see how that's actually impacted website visitor lifts, how it's impacted conversion, app downloads. There's a plethora of companies that have spent now almost a decade. So that's companies like Reveal Mobile, PlaceIQ, ABCS Insights that I mentioned, and a number of legacy measurement companies that have leaned into our channel and made it that you can effectively measure campaigns. Now I will say you don't have the immediate user or cookie ID, but I would say that you have enough data and you have enough signal to measure the effectiveness and frankly, the incrementality and how when you layer digital out of home in with a mobile campaign or layer digital out of home in with a social or CTV campaign, the data points to just an incredible multiplier effect that comes through these campaigns so much so it's really something that Adam and I talk about a lot with our team, with our network partners that have only people really embraced what the data is telling them. The data is telling them that if you're a DTC brand that is advertising on Facebook or Instagram or Tik Tok, and you're in a sea of other companies that are selling to the exact same audience, standing out using screens in the physical world is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself and capture the necessary mindshare to stand out. And if they just used a fraction of their budget, or even if just 1% of all digital video spend went to digital out of home, it would exponentially grow our channel. And that's so much the responsibility that we and our team take on is that of education and empowering the buy side such that they can really see the efficacy and overall opportunity they have by leaning into digital out of home.