Digital Signage Today
00:17:17 · Ari Buchalter
[00:17:17] S2: Yeah. Logarithmic or even exponential, which would be even faster growing. Digital out of home is certainly the fastest growing component of out of home more broadly. And then within digital out of home, programmatic piece is even faster growing still. It is, I think, a little bit tough to come by reliable estimates, but my guess, and this is just a rough guess, is that programmatic digital out of home is kind of somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly $500,000,000 market in The US today. That's, of course, not including rest of the world that may perhaps double that. And it's growing at high double digit rates. So overall, out of home may be growing at low single digit. Digital out of home may be sort of low double digit growth, 10%, 12%, something like that. But programmatic digital out of home is going to be multiples higher than that, probably somewhere between 50100% year over year growth at this rate. You know, it's always hard to project out the future, particularly far out in the future. But if you look at how every other digital channel has evolved, and by that, I mean online advertising, mobile advertising and so forth, Programmatic has come to account for about 85 to 95% of how those channels transact. So personally, I don't think digital out of home is going to be the only channel that ends up bucking that trend, and for some reason not. You know, also achieving that that type of majority share of transactions. It is still, you know, relatively small today, 500,000,000 in The US, perhaps again, of a total $8,000,000,000 out of home market. But it is it is fast growing, and it is, you know, gaining the attention of new buyers. Right? So it's not just that more money is flowing in, but it's coming in from places that hadn't bought out of home before, and that's really exciting to sellers.
00:19:12 · Daniel Brown, Ari Buchalter
[00:19:12] S1: Well, it's funny you say that because even taking taxis and Uber in the last couple of years, I've noticed all these amazing advertising screens and interactive contents in the back seat where I can order products, and there's QR codes for my phone, and I get discounts, and it's it's blowing my mind, truly. Now with this growing trend, you know, we've noticed in digital signage in general, technology in business, now also in DOH. This ESG sustainability, accessibility, BEI, you know, these topics are growing thanks to pressure from consumers, industry, and the government. Yep. How can we build a programmatic DOH industry that is profitable, accessible, and maybe even aesthetic? [00:19:52] S2: So it's a great question. I think in some ways we are already doing some of those things, although I think we certainly have a lot more work to do in those areas. I'll give a couple of examples. Let's start [00:20:03] S1: with
00:20:03 · Ari Buchalter
[00:20:03] S2: sustainability. So digital screens, of course, avoid the physical waste that you have associated with printing and posting and taking down static ads. And of course, media owners who own those digital screens and operate those digital screens, they're inherently incentivized to minimize costs around things like power consumption for those screens, which themselves are getting smarter and greener every day. So I think there's already a good story to tell about the things that are organically happening in the digital out of home space from a sustainability standpoint. But as an industry, I think we do need to embrace the trend of actually measuring the carbon footprint of our media, which is something you're seeing happening a lot in other media channels, both because that kind of transparency is just the right thing to do. Right. You can't manage your manage your carbon footprint and reduce it until you actually measure it, but also because it's increasingly becoming an important decision criterion for buyers. Right. We're seeing more and more buyers care about and ask about the sustainability of their advertising efforts, right? How much power and how many cc's of carbon are associated with an advertising campaign, which may not be something you think about ordinarily, but the answer can be quite significant. So I think there's already a good story to tell, but more work to be done around that type of measurement and transparency. The other thing you mentioned or one other thing you mentioned was around DEI diversity, equity, inclusion. My view is that the strongest businesses are built on a diversity of ideas. And that in turn comes from a diversity of thought, diversity of experiences, and ultimately diversity of people. And I think out of home in general, in particular, that leadership levels in our industry, it skews a bit older white male. I am one of them, admittedly. And that's not something you can easily change overnight. I think what you have to do is look at your entire sort of people process from end to end, look at your hiring practices, look at how you train people, how you compensate people, how you promote people, and see where there may be biases in those processes that may be getting in the way of creating equal opportunities. It's not an easy thing to do.
00:22:21 · Ari Buchalter, Daniel Brown
We often need help from the outside in to help you as a business do that. But I think it's important and necessary for business success, frankly. [00:22:31] S1: Sounds like that trend we've covered, do good to do well, even if an integer [00:22:35] S2: There's another t shirt right there. [00:22:38] S1: Coffee mug. Coffee mug. [00:22:40] S2: Coffee mug. Sorry. Yes. [00:22:41] S1: Well, I love that, you know, increased data seems to show that doing the right thing is also the selfish thing, so why not do the right thing? I love that very much. We'll talk about Ian Bremmer in our next episode in political risk consulting. Now content content is key. We've been preaching this gospel for a year now, a year and a few days. Can you comment a little bit on content strategies, including creative movement or even timing, that work well or don't work well in this space?
00:23:11 · Ari Buchalter
[00:23:11] S2: So I'm not a creative, so I won't have any design wisdom pearls to share. But as a technologist, it's certainly clear that technology is creating new possibilities when it comes to design and content and creative. We already touched on, you know, probably the most talked about piece of right now with generative AI, and that's clearly going to transform our ability to create and refine content at a larger scale and at a faster pace. But at an even simpler and more immediate level, what excites me are possibilities around what we call dynamic creative, right? So normally you think of the ad, obviously for a static out of home posting, the ad doesn't change. But even for a digital out of home ad, typically, you know, the ad is just sort of sitting there on the screen. If you think about it, of course, our medium is essentially location and time, right? It's all about where and when we're reaching people in the real world on their commutes to work and shopping and filling up the tank and exercising at the gym, going out at the town. There's a ton of information about those physical contexts that can be used to change the creative in real time, make it more relevant to whatever's going on at that place at that time. So whether it's, you know, something as simple as just having a different message show up based on the time of day or during the weather, we just talked about the storms we're experiencing here in New York, good time to advertise umbrellas. Or it could be the distance to the nearest retail location or the latest promotional offer, the latest betting line on the sports game this weekend. Any real time information can be used to dynamically tailor message in real time. And we have the ability to do that dynamic tailoring now, pull in that information and present relevant messaging to the consumer. So it's sort of the proverbial, you know, last coffee mug perhaps, but the proverbial right message at the right place at the right time. And dynamic creative really makes that possible. And doing that at the scale of digital out of home in the physical world, I think is really, really exciting.
00:25:12 · Daniel Brown, Ari Buchalter
[00:25:12] S1: And as a consumer, I can testify, this is another example that doing good to do well, it actually helps me if I I need a freaking umbrella and they're charging $40 at the newsstand. Oh, wait, there's one for $10. This is perfect. This gets me home dry, you know? So you can serve the consumer and make a little money at the same time. [00:25:31] S2: No doubt. No doubt. And it's really and it also gains attention, right? Like people notice that these ads are tailored to them, right? To their locality, to their, you know, it's the movie show times at the theater around the corner. It's not just, you know, the advertising component, it's actually providing utility to the consumer that kind of helps them with, you know, whatever they're trying to do. So it's definitely a win win. [00:25:55] S1: That's brilliant. Listen, Ari, we've got, like, 10 episodes I wanna do after this. I'm a huge fan. You're you're the expert in this field, though, so I really wanna just hand you the mic. Did we miss any major themes folks should know about as we gear up for the new year?