Australia’s ‘obsessive focus’ with performance its main barrier to programmatic growth: Dentsu global OOH boss
While the industry is “bullish” about programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH)’s growth, there are some “intertwined” barriers to further adoption, according to Dentsu’s global head of OOH, Ben Milne.
Speaking at the IAB and Outdoor Media Association’s (OMA) Powering Digital Out Of Home (OOH) summit in Sydney yesterday, Milne said the main barrier to the growth of programmatic in Australia is the market’s “obsessive focus” on performance.
Ben Milne presented at the summit on Thursday
“I think some of the barriers are around the metrics, that lower funnel piece and an obsessive focus on performance,” he told oOh Media’s group director of platforms, Emma Hegg in a fireside chat.
“At the end of the day programmatic allows new types of buyers to access the medium, but what the medium can do for them doesn’t have to always be about performance. It doesn’t have to always be on that lower-funnel piece.
“There’s an opportunity to, if you like, almost separate the conversation from the data, the measurement, the metrics piece, and the strategy – the reason why we are doing things.”
According to a 2022 report from IAB Australia, 83% of Australian agencies said they had used pDOOH and 48% said they were regularly considering it in their buying activities.
Impacting brand awareness remained the dominant objective for pDOOH, while data and targeting were identified as the key driver of pDOOH usage.
Milne said that overall, pDOOH is still at an “incredibly early stage”, although it could reach “the tipping point” soon.
He added that Australia is not necessarily far behind the UK and the US when it comes to programmatic, with all three markets poised to take off in the next two years.
However, the biggest opportunity that will benefit DOOH and programmatic overall, according to Milne, lies in the video world.
“I think so much of the focus and so much of what we talked about today is still on what was traditionally the programmatic display market … but where the US may be doing more than anyone else is to really attack the video world.
“If you think about the rise of connected TV, that’s absolutely taken off – of course it has, because you can just pour TV campaigns directly into that.
“The question is, how do we better, more efficiently, and quickly convert video content to things that work on our media?”
According to an OMA report earlier in Janruary, DOOH revenue accounted for 64.1% of total net media revenue year-to-date then, an increase over the recorded 58.9% for the same period last year. The association was set to push further into programmatic and automation this year with the release of an industry Impression Multiplier.
Mumbrella’s Dr Mumbo looked at another way an agency is using digital out-of-home advertising this morning.
Got a tip?
Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
Linkedin
Marketers should always be obsessive on performance. The real issue Ben was outlining was a short term focus that corrals marketers to only or disproportionately assess the bottom of the funnel. There are plenty of brand health metrics further up the funnel that can equally be obsessed over.
User ID not verified.
Have your say