‘Further digitisation is the primary objective’: oOh!media’s CEO Cathy O’Connor
oOh!media’s H122 results released today showed robust out-of-home recovery. Speaking to Mumbrella today, CEO Cathy O’Connor said that further digitisation is the primary objective leading into a healthy H2 market.
Considerable growth was seen today in the Retail, Fly, and Locate formats, with broader post-COVID recovery fostering a healthier OOH marketplace.
Cathy O’Connor
O’Connor noted that “growth in our Road, Retail and Street furniture formats” was seen, indicative of heightened consumer engagement with the respective physical environments.
“We’ve also seen a return of passengers to transport environments particularly airports, and some stabilisation of CBD audiences as well,” she said.
“As we’ve demonstrated in the past, audience patterns as they return to normal bring obvious growth to OOH, but more importantly we’re seeing structural growth in the sector.”
In the SMI data, OOH was 11.6% of total media for the half year to June 2022, yet it took 14% of the growth in all media for that half year period.”
“So you can see that it’s well-positioned to continue to grow in the share of total media, and the reason for that is digitisation, in addition to the way in which the industry is increasingly available on programmatic platforms- including the way a lot of the work is done in the creative space to use OOH.”
oOh!media’s MOVE measurement methodology outlines the process of how accurate audience reach and frequency measures for OOH campaigns are obtained. O’Connor highlighted the offering’s enhanced uptake by agencies as a sign that OOH would continue to thrive well into 2022 and beyond.
“In Q2 of this year, usage of MOVE measurement by agencies was up 41% on 2021, so there’s an enormous amount of interest in this sector. We’re the largest player in the sector, so we stand to benefit greatly.”
“We’ve seen a gradual improvement in business and revenue as the lockdowns have subsided. The big challenges are behind us – positive times are ahead.”
Weaker growth was seen in the Locate format than Fly and Retail – when asked what strategy the company would take to navigate difficulties with the format when WFH is still firmly intact across most office policies, O’Connor said the business would simply pivot to target customers where they were, in ‘suburban streets’ and ‘retail centres’.
“We’re still going to be able to see revenue growth in Locate. Ultimately our job is about the customer journey, so if customers are in the office a little less than they were, then through our mass reach we can isolate and reach those customers in those ways.”
‘Continuing to digitise assets in key locations’ was pegged as a primary goal of the company leading into H2.
“Our street furniture and retail assets are under-digitised. We’ve brought online 21 new retail precincts in the first half of the year and there will be more to come. We’ve also got a couple of big street furniture contracts just renewed. There’s plenty more to invest in terms of the digitisation of what we do.”
“There are obvious investments and they tend to lean digital.”
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topics
Cathy O'Connor
digitisation
DOOH
h122 results
move measurement
oOh
ooh assets
oOh!MEdia
Programmatic
q2
q2 2022
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