Beyond The Billboard
00:15:18 · Remi Du Preez
It becomes a bit mundane just serving impressions on a phone. Now they know I can serve on screens in the real world where there's no bots. It really feels like honestly, it's like a breath of fresh air for the digital strategists, where they have this new shiny toy, and they can boast about it to their You know, it's like, go and look down there. We're booking this from Google, from DV360. How amazing is that? So there's a lot of excitement around the way the guys are using the technology as well. So look, a lot more money from the out of home space will eventually move programmatically as market matures. Loop based buying won't go away. I don't see it going away at all. I still I really do still believe it has a lot of value, especially when you have a frequency is sort of the general call on campaign. But let's look at where the internet world was fifteen years ago. Guys are still doing a lot of direct buys and they started shifting programmatically to the point where majority of the ads are still being delivered programmatically. So we have hindsight, which is a beautiful thing in an industry. We just have to look at the internet world to see what they're doing and also even learn from their mistakes and make sure we don't make the same mistakes ourselves.
00:16:29 · Kirsty Carlson, S2
[00:16:29] S1: I love that, Remi. I had such a laugh there with the digital team. And you know what? Still to this day, I sit in meetings sometimes and I hear another new abbreviation in this media industry. And it usually comes from the digital team. And often I'm like, Okay, here we go. Got to give me the new one. Fill me in. [00:16:55] S2: Nalasa Media, giving your brand the right exposure. We are a 100% black female owned company aimed at providing quality and futuristic out of home placement. Visit our website today on www.nalisamedia.zo.za. For more information, follow us on our socials to keep up to date with our latest news.
00:17:20 · Livia Brown
[00:17:20] S0: Remi, I love... So you touched on a point that I think is so important. And I think that I've seen this kind of when digital out of home first comes from South Africa, a lot of the traditional billboard guys were kind of like, what happens to my billboards now that we have digital out of home? And the answer then was like, it becomes part of the media mix. And the same thing happens now with programmatic. I've had a lot of clients, media owners, clients feel we have to we have to be on programmatic. Media owners, we've got to get enabled for programmatic. And then what happens to my loop? Happens to the screens where I'm actually losing money when I am selling programmatically and it doesn't work for my business? My screens are on the malls. How do I feature? A lot of these questions are coming up. And I think, again, the answer is that it becomes part of the media mix. Again, it always goes back to what is your strategy for out of home? What are you trying to achieve for your client? Not everything has to be a digital billboard. Not everything has to be programmatic. Not everything should be static. It's more about looking at things from an omnichannel perspective. And I think that from a media owner perspective, sometimes you're in your your media owner lane and you know what inventory you have. But you must remember that the role of a strategist is to actually pull together the the omnichannel mix together. So to understand, we can have a mix of static billboards and traditional loop based buying and programmatic buying in the same campaign. Like, we can all share in the same strategic kind of journey to achieve what we want to for the client. And I think from your perspective, what's also interesting is that coming from an out of home background, you don't have a team of programmatic out of home people. You have a team of digital people that you have upskilled on how the out of home landscape works. But the worlds have merged closer and closer. And that's why we're seeing such great work coming to market is that the closer the media channels get, and I guess in an extent, the less precious everyone around is TV does this, digital does this, out of home does this, and these very specific silos.
00:19:17 · Livia Brown
When you start to dissolve those lines, that's where we're seeing the beautiful work coming to market that's really making people say like, wow, this is some really cool work. One of the other questions that I wanted to ask you, Remi, as we head towards kind of the closing on our side, and it's a bit of a hot topic. I know we have discussed it in some of the do. Cio. Za programmatic newsletter that's come out too. But just for everybody listening and from your perspective, where are we sitting from a measurement perspective? I think once everyone's got their head around what is programmatic, the next question is how is the measurement being done and what channels are or what data sources are being used? How can they be used? And who should be championing that journey?
00:19:57 · Remi Du Preez
[00:19:57] S3: No, I think it's definitely probably one of the most hot topics at the moment because, as you say, guys are quite comfortable with programmatic insofar. But people want a little bit more. That sort of excitement about EDU is sort of not died down. It's just stabilized. So for me, it's just the measurement is sort of the new space. Our measurement tools are not perfect. And where we want to get to is you want to, again, look at what the internet fraternity did well. And it's scalable across publishers, the same kind of methodologies. And that doesn't quite exist just yet. Right now, if you want to do and there's sort of two elements to it. So let's talk it's like the planning phase. Before I drop my money into this DSP, how many people am I actually going to reach? And the answer is we don't really know. Let's just be perfectly honest. It is exceptionally difficult. Not impossible, but you can do a bit of media maths on some tools that you have at your disposal to have some indication of what you're going to have. So I do think that the industry, the tech players specifically do need to do a little bit more work. And when I say the tech players, again, it's look at the internet fraternity when they started introducing programmatic as a general buying mechanism. They didn't have all the answers. Guys were standing on the sidelines going, hold on, I think I can solve that. And everybody started rushing, developing solutions. And then eventually, something stuck, and it just became the norm. And then that was sort of the way to measure. And then new little features that the market required these things. So right now, nobody has come up with a formidable, scalable solution that can actually help us understand how many people am I going to reach in a campaign before I serve out the ads? Yes, we have our impressions goals, but we don't really know like unique reach and a couple of other things will be important for planning. So there's a bit of a shortfall there. But then sort of how do we serve in market audiences? Now this thing has started working quite well. Not nearly perfect just yet. And this is sort of embedding and using cell phone data. So what happens is all of us have a cell phone, and we subscribe to hundreds of different apps. And within those apps, especially the free ones, mean, they need to make money.
00:22:07 · Remi Du Preez
And the way they make money is that you need to give you a location setting to be able to use the app in many instances. And in that instance, that information is shared with someone in the background who pays for that info and eventually us as clients or media owners, we actually pay for that luxury to track audiences. That's one way that we can currently track audiences, sort of people that have been seen inside certain environments. We want to know which billboards they go pass at whatever time of day. And then sort of, for lack of a better word, spam a billboard because historically, we see these kinds of people. So we're using past behavior to sort of indicate future behavior. And that sort of determines the scheduling. The mechanisms, I don't think are bad at all because they do optimize and refine themselves. However, the sample sizes are still quite small. So you could then refine about 10% of cell phones are normally coming through there. One big barrier is the attic guys want way too much money. So minimum spend is a good couple of R100,000, which then means only the guys with those kinds of budgets can actually spend it. Which if you again, if you look at the digital space, mom and pop shops have the opportunity with a few thousand rand to be able to run maybe not effective campaigns, but they have the tools. We to break down those cost barriers. And then on the flip side, on the other side, you have the measurements, the let's say attribution rather. What do people do when they actually come into contact with an ad? Likewise, SDKs can be used from mobile apps. Were people exposed to a billboard when that ad flighted? There's a timestamp on that billboard. There's a timestamp of your cell phone in front of that billboard. And then did that cell phone show up inside of my customer's store? We don't know if you bought anything, but hey, we saw him inside of the store. It's very likely that something happened there. So that's sort of the general attribution that we're currently working on. When it gets to online attribution, it can now start getting a little bit deeper. The ad tech guys haven't quite nailed that. But there are a couple of lease operators on the side where you can drop in tags and clients' websites within big publisher environments, and then track audiences in that kind of way.