Guest Contributor, Anna Hedley
You had only to look around the room at the last AdTECH: OOH – London event to understand how the industry is embracing the concept of automated and programmatic trading of DOOH. What started off as a small half-day workshop back in 2016 is now a global series with events in London, Amsterdam, New York and Sydney. Attendance from senior level members of both the buy and sell-side is testament to where automation sits on the industry’s agenda.
Dig deeper still, particularly on the buy-side, and you’ll see how that agenda is already in motion. Sophisticated, proprietary automated planning systems are being developed. MediaCom’s Trading Desk, Talon’s Plato, Posterscope’s Ecos and Kinetic’s Aureus are all data-driven systems designed to plan and buy in increasingly audience, rather than panel, centric and granular ways, albeit each one with a different approach.
It is this more granular way of delivering D/OOH campaigns that is being heralded as the big hope for OOH’s growth. Adding real audience data to OOH’s already competitive brand-building arsenal, will make it an increasingly enticing option for brands jaded by Online’s ad-blocking and brand safety sagas. It may just coerce advertiser dollars away from other mediums and into D/OOH.
But as an industry, we’ve hit a stumbling block in our progress. Interoperability, or incompatibility, between these systems. Despite the excellent efforts of the UK Out of Home Standards Committee with the adoption of the IAB standard OpenDirect, D/OOH systems are being developed in silos. These individualised SSP and DSP platforms speak different languages, give things different names and even define their purchase by different parameters.
The result is serious friction between the two platforms needed to complete a transaction. This friction makes it difficult to initiate a connection, and even more of a headache to maintain one, as each side develops and updates a system tailored to their agenda. The result is a transaction between buyers and sellers which is, at best, “psuedo-programmatic” in that somewhere along the line a human has to heavily intervene.
Before we can even think about taking money from the purse of other mediums we need to find a solution to this compatibility conundrum and ensure we have a connected landscape set up to deliver on the programmatic promise at scale.
So, how do we ease the friction between OOH systems?
One way to fast-track your progress and solve interoperability between systems is to enlist the help of a technology partner. At Signkick, we’ve introduced Signkick Trading Bridge to do just that for media owners. Signkick Trading Bridge is the friction-free way for D/OOH media owners to connect and trade with automated buyers.
Once the media owner connection is in place, Signkick Trading Bridge manages all translations and conversions between you to respond to availability requests and allow buyers to plan and purchase your inventory via automated guaranteed.
Working with Signkick Trading Bridge leaves you in complete control of the commercials with the ability to implement unique business rules for each of your buyers.
Best of all, we’re pre-building connections with the major automated buyers, so all you have to worry about is agreeing your terms of trade and connecting with us.
So whether you are a top-tier media owner just looking for compatibility, or a challenger brand starting from scratch, Signkick Trading Bridge can help you get ahead. Discover more here.
You can also watch the video here.
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