Upfronts season: Why oOh!media’s new Reooh is ‘more than just retail’
In the penultimate Mumbrellacast Upfronts special, oOh!media's CEO Cathy O'Connor joins host, Calum Jaspan to chat about last week's Outfront, which unveiled the outdoor company's new retail media outfit, Reooh. Listen in to hear O'Connor run through the playbook, while also talking about why fewer words is more in outdoor creative, expanding programmatic, and the growing sports pillar.
Last week at its Outfront event, oOh!media told the industry it is expanding into the booming retail media game with its new setup, Reooh, and speaking on this week’s Mumbrellacast Upfronts special, CEO Cathy O’Connor explains why the move was an easy one.
“Reooh has been set up as a service to brands and partners that are looking for an easy way and a turnkey way to set up their own digital out-of-home screen network.”
O’Connor says the move is really broader than retail though, its about any brand that has a physical presence.
“There are many, many categories beyond just the retailers themselves. Think telcos, financial services clients, petra convenience clients, many different forms of partners that we would be talking to that really do have their audiences and their customers moving about physical environments.”
“When we’ve been talking and looking at these emerging spaces and often talking to these brands about their advertising, it became very clear to us that part of our core competency as a business is building digital screen networks. It’s what we do every day, and when we approach a commercial tender for a contract for assets, we’re doing that on two fronts. We’re doing the building of the digital network, and the revenue that we can deliver from the media side of things. So really Reooh is just a decoupling of that.”
An easy pivot for oOh!, says O’Connor
“It’s a capability we already have, our ability to design, build, and procure. It’s really part of the side of the business that perhaps the media aren’t as familiar with, which is the infrastructure, property and logistics side of an out-of-home business.”
“We have deep capability in being able to bring an owned media channel like screens to life, and so the ability to pivot into a service provider to brands is a very easy one for us.”
While being an easy one, and an intuitive one, she adds the company is dealing with brands it is already dealing with on the marketing side, which deepens those relationships even further, becoming a media channel and also a service provider.
O’Connor said the company has already been having conversations with potential partners, and that those will be announced in the near future when it has them.
Over the course of the conversation, O’Connor speaks about the expansion of programmatic trading through oOh!, why the company is a market leader in 3D anamorphic advertising, new deals with Broadsheet and the Australian Open, and how exactly it is testing the effectiveness of creative campaigns to improve outcomes for partners, all underpinned by its digital-first future approach.
Listen to the full interview with Cathy O’Connor on the Mumbrellacast.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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