Digital Signage Today
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.
00:19:37 · Judy Mottl
[00:19:37] S0: The reason I brought up the whole idea of measurement is that many companies don't realize what you just said. It's available, and it's actually tangible and it is a misnomer, I think, that holds people back, holds a brand back from jumping in. And I wanted to ask you, if I was a retailer or a brand, and I'm looking to do this, to get into this channel, and I wanna work with Screenverse. What does that process kind of look like? Can you take me through kind of how you work with the client?
00:20:14 · Adam Malone
[00:20:14] S2: I'll try to distill it down. So we have a pretty exhaustive process on the front end because we have a couple of these kind of core philosophies around it that we use here. The first is beware the easy yes. So if there's a retail network that's stood themselves up and they're looking for representation in existing network that's in malls, that's in gyms, that's somewhere that's being productive, maybe programmatic isn't yet something that's really driving new business for them substantially. So a lot of folks hear about us, they come to us, thank goodness. You know, we get referrals and things like that, and it's wonderful. And so we try to understand the first thing is, you know, is there real media value here? So we have access to a tremendous amount of sales data. We're in, you know, 30 plus different venue types. We've got 20 partners, we're in all the markets. So we don't have to kind of guess too much. So we kind of know what the market CPMs are, we kind of know what the sell through rates are, and we understand the unit economics of these kinds of screens in these categories in these markets. And so we'll map all that out and we'll say, hey, here's what we think the total value of the network is. Then we do an audit of the technology suite that the network might have. Sometimes they get bonuses for having really advanced technology, great integrations, great data, all of that kind of humming along nicely. And some networks aren't quite there yet. So they don't have the technology really working for them. And so we either kind of bonus or discount based on the current state of their tech. We then look at other operations and financial things, and we try to set expectations. Here's what we think we can do in year one and year two and year three. And what we have found since we've been in this game now for five plus years is, yes, we wanna drive a ton of new revenue to you in year one, but we also wanna build in year two and year three and year four. And if you know anything about how compounding works, it's exciting to see, you know, X percent growth year over year, but it's very exciting to stretch that over many years. And so when I say beware of the easy yes, we don't want, you know, we wanna make long term partnership commitments.