Life in Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home
00:00:02 · S0, S1, Dan Larden
[00:00:02] S0: Life in Programmatic Digital Out of Home brought to you by JCDecaux. Bringing together the greatest minds, discussing the latest [00:00:28] S1: Hello and welcome to Life in Programmatic Digital Out of Home. Today I am joined by, I'm going say one of the pioneers in this space, Dan Larden, who is Head of UK at TPA Digital. So welcome to the podcast Dan and just to kick off, can you just tell us a little bit about you, what you do and how you got involved in Programmatic Digital Out of Home? [00:00:49] S2: Yeah sure, thank you for having me. Pioneer in this space. Well the pressure's on me hasn't it? [00:00:56] S1: Pressure's always on that, always on! [00:00:59] S2: So yes, right now I'm the Head of UK for TPA Digital. We are a consultancy which specializes in giving impartial advice to brands around the ad tech ecosystem. We are all ex agency people or demand side guys that have worked in brands or ad tech and I'm no different. So I've been in digital advertising for about thirteen years, predominantly in ad tech, so I've had a number of different roles on the agency and the ad tech side, but always with a demand focus and predominantly in product and partnerships roles as well, which has meant that I've been on the pointy end of the shiny new things that come to ad tech and Programmatic at Home being one. So interested to have a chat and talk about where we've come from within this space which is obviously very fast moving.
00:00:59 · Dan Larden, S1
[00:00:59] S2: So yes, right now I'm the Head of UK for TPA Digital. We are a consultancy which specializes in giving impartial advice to brands around the ad tech ecosystem. We are all ex agency people or demand side guys that have worked in brands or ad tech and I'm no different. So I've been in digital advertising for about thirteen years, predominantly in ad tech, so I've had a number of different roles on the agency and the ad tech side, but always with a demand focus and predominantly in product and partnerships roles as well, which has meant that I've been on the pointy end of the shiny new things that come to ad tech and Programmatic at Home being one. So interested to have a chat and talk about where we've come from within this space which is obviously very fast moving. [00:01:59] S1: Yeah it's very fast moving Dan. So let's pick that up I guess right from the start. Can you just give us a little bit about experience in actually activating programmatic Digital Out of Home, where you've had fingers on keys and when that happened, what you learnt and how that's evolved?
00:02:15 · Dan Larden
[00:02:15] S2: Yeah sure, so I mean the very first time I got involved was probably, think it was about 2018, so it was very early on. At the time I was working for a digital agency called Infectious Media and we were slightly different than we had our own DSP. And one day we had a very interesting meeting with a supply side out of home company who said, 'hey, I think we can integrate into your bidder. And at first we thought, well, this is a bit nuts. We'd only ever done programmatic display and social and obviously smaller formats and things. So we gave it a go essentially thinking back to that time, we kind of had three stakeholders to convince, I guess, that we could do this. So we had the sort of supply side and then we had the internal team. We had to actually convince the business that this was something worth building. Then we had the client side, so obviously we had to go and try and make sure that the clients were going to buy after we'd done the work to integrate. So it was quite an interesting time. By far the easiest part was getting the supply side adopted because there were quite a lot of people on the supply side who were very interested in giving this a go and that was obviously publishers within the Out-of-Home who had smaller sales teams and were kind of looking for ways to actually increase demand for their inventory, but also that then people like yourself who were representing the larger publishers as well who were kind of willing to give this new way of buying a punt. And then the internal stakeholders to try and just make sure that we could build this and get it built, again, didn't take too much convincing, luckily, because we were quite an innovative agency and our founders were always interested in testing new things. The hardest bit was the client side, for sure. Thinking back, our clients at the time were heads of programmatic and performance and people that had predominantly just again done sort of search and social and programmatic. And when we put it to them that we could buy out of home in a programmatic way, again, they were convinced. But then we had this problem of the fact that our home was always bought in the same way for them and the company. And actually, so this client we're actually talking about is John Lewis, was our client at the time, who we eventually ended up running the first campaign with.
00:05:04 · Dan Larden, S1
But yeah, that was by far the hardest stakeholder to convince and I think back then, thinking back, we kind of overcome these technical hurdles but actually it was almost the commercial hurdles within the client and actually getting the campaign which was the hardest piece actually. [00:05:24] S1: Yeah I think that would resonate with anyone who works in an emerging programmatic channel is the tech is one thing but the people and the structure and the teams is something completely different and bringing people along on that journey is critically important. I think what I enjoyed most from your answer there Dan was actually when you described the absolute fundamentals of my career as giving this new way of buying a punt. So I'm gonna add that to my CV or my LinkedIn profile, I think, day to day. Just taking that one step further, I obviously remember that campaign with a lot of kind of love and we worked on it and it was very worthwhile and worthy and new and exciting at the time but obviously things have evolved since then and I'm thinking back to I guess last year where we ran a campaign together I think to launch some of the TPA Academy work that we've done. I wonder if you could share with us how that experience varied from that first campaign to the campaign that we ran together last year.
00:06:23 · Dan Larden
[00:06:23] S2: Yeah, I mean it couldn't have been more different, could it? Mean, yeah, so five years ago, again, were first through the gate, got the bloody nose for sure. I think there was a lot of testing going on. There was a lot of uncertainty on the buy side of how do we set this campaign up, what creatives do we use, how do we optimise this, how do we plan it, how can we incorporate the data into our existing digital campaigns. All of these things were sort of the first time that we'd done it. So although it was quite exciting, often problems come. And we were talking just before this around just simple integration pieces, overcoming how do I incorporate root data into the bid stream. These sorts of challenges meant that we were stopped starting and campaigns got delayed for sure. And again, on top of the issues that we had in terms of the client trying to get budgets signed off for this new way of doing out of home. And then I think fast forward to last year when we ran this test with you, and it was I I couldn't believe how much it changed actually and how much easier it was because all of those problems have almost been, over five years, been ironed out for sure. So now the thing that surprised me the most was when we ran the campaign, it was just how quickly and easily we could determine the availability of ads, the out of home screens. Very quick to do the planning piece. The creative tracking that we did, I think it took a week maybe even less than that, think. And that's including the build, wasn't it? And then getting it traffic to the DSP and getting everything signed off on your side. So yeah, I think everything from just the technical piece and then obviously then just all of the bits that you need to run a campaign in terms of that trafficking and setup piece really surprised me. And then getting hold of the data as well to do our analysis was pretty simple as well and easy to do. So I think for sure all of the headaches that we had five years ago, you know, fast forward today, it's certainly benign now into a much smoother process to just get creatives built and done and activated.
00:08:45 · Dan Larden, S1
But what's exciting isn't it, what's exciting still is that even all that's been ironed out in terms of the bit that you would expect to be ironed out, but the use cases are still coming thick and fast into how do you actually then use that as a brand and as a marketer to the best of your ability, that is still an area which I think is still moving forward isn't it? [00:09:09] S1: Yeah it makes me think about the kind of traditional crawl, walk, run life cycle and kind of where we are on that journey. I think even if I would try and answer that I couldn't give you a firm answer, don't think we're running yet or what I'd say we're definitely not running yet but are we between crawl and walk or between walk and run? I don't know and I think one of the things that's evolving in this space and it's really interesting certainly for media purists is what is the media theory behind all of this and then how is it applied and how is it proving itself to be true or not. And I know again talking to you before this session today, we've talked about the concept of I believe what you're calling fixed point programmatic. So I just kind of want, we'd like you to kind of explain what that is Dan for the people listening into this and what this concept that have named we should call it the Dan Larden fixed point programmatic I think.