Robert O'Rourke and Stephen Brooks teach us about connecting CTV buyers with DOOH

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Welcome everybody to the OOH Insider Show, a podcast like no other, hosted by the one and only Tim Rowe. Get ready to have some knowledge dropped on you and to be entertained because nothing's more valuable than food for your brain. So sit back, relax, we're about to dive in as the best industry podcast is about to begin.

Tim Rowe: Welcome to another episode of OOH Insider. On our look back, check out my appearance on the Marketecture Podcast. We'll be airing it in a few weeks. So take a look at that. It's linked in the show notes below. In our look ahead next week, we'll be talking to Chris Kane from Jounce Media. We'll be talking all about the recent open RTB research, making a lot of buzz around the, around the industry. But today's conversation is specifically about separating CTV from DOOH. how to do that, why it matters, because being able to distinguish between CTV and DOOH, it's really essential for media buyers and, and advertisers brands to understand what they're buying. So to this point, CTV, we've assumed it to be home-based viewing, but with the expansion of obviously screens in the public space, place-based advertising and venues, the lines between CTV and digital out of home continue to blur. Same advantages that make CTV popular at home are now present in venues like bars, restaurants, retail venues, but there are challenges in bridging the gap between the living room and the waiting room. And today we're going to explore one of the ways that bridge is being built. Rob O'Rourke, Stephen Brooks. Thank you both for being here, Steven. I want to open this with you. How does content adjacency unlock CTV dollars for digital out of home?

Stephen Brooks: Yeah. Thank you, Tim. It's good to be here. And that's a great question. I'm going to take it back over a hundred years and just sort of take us through the history of advertising, whether it's print moving into digital print, which is websites, whether it's radio moving into digital audio, whether it's the early days of television and now digital video, there's always been in those panels, an implicit understanding that the enhancement for the advertising is the content, right? So the content adjacency helps make the advertisement a little bit more engaging, but it also provides really, really critical information to the advertiser, which is to say context, right? So that you can have content targeting, you can have lifestyle targeting through that content. DOOH traditionally billboards on the sides of streets and freeways has lacked that context. It's just an ad. However, with the digitizing of out of home, that stricture is no longer in existence, right? But the transference from just advertising only into an advertising plus content A model which every other channel enjoys hasn't really fully taken hold yet. So to answer your question, I would say, number one, it's just how advertising has traditionally in all of the channels been delivered. And because of that number two, it actually conveys a great deal of information to the buyer, which is to say context, content context provides brand safe environment for your targeted audience to consume your brand message. And then number three, It's just how buyers are, are not only used to interacting, but the content itself actually is a trigger point. I want to be next to sports, the US Open, the Olympics. I want to be next to, you know, discussions about, um, you know, the, the, uh, the election or the debates or whatever it might be.

Tim Rowe: Or I don't want to be, I want to have some control over exclusions. Exactly.

Stephen Brooks: Absolutely critical, right? Because this cuts both ways. This is why having that choice and having that trigger is so important because one advertiser's preference may be another advertiser's no-go. And that's just, it's so critical.

Tim Rowe: Rob, how does this impact the ecosystem?

Rob O'Rourke: Yeah. And also Tim, thanks for having us on. Really appreciate you having us. Myself and Stephen on and speak about AdExact and what we're doing in this ecosystem as you speak to that now, is that this is good news. There's nothing bad here. We're bringing positivity and we're opening up doors and more importantly, we're opening up avenues for more buying streams to come in from an omni-channel standpoint. So in macro ecosystem of buying, we want to open up DOOH networks across our vertical, two more People who want to plan and buy make it easy, but content is king and context is relevant. And we're with our, our platform at exec plus what we're doing is we're layering in the ability to curate. not only content, which we say is king, but also the context of that content at your fingertips to decide when and what you want to be adjacent to. So whether it's CTV buyers or social media buyers, they can now come over to DOOH and say, we want to take that format and that content that we want to be adjacent to and pair it with our Digital at Home buy as well and open up those purses and that omnichannel experience in a whole new level that everyone can enjoy. And we're excited to do that. And this is not hurting anybody. We're not competing at anybody yet, but the table, we want to make this something that's fun and also opens up a lot more doors of opportunity.

Tim Rowe: So what is it exactly? Is it a CMS for my DOOH network? Is this a unique ad product? How, how should we be thinking about what ad exact is and how it fits into the, the overall picture?

Rob O'Rourke: Yeah, I'll jump in. That's a yes. And give it to Steve.

Tim Rowe: I should have defined, I should have defined who that question was intended for. I apologize. Stephen, go ahead. Jump in on it.

Stephen Brooks: Sure. Yeah, that's a yes. And you know, the, the CMS obviously is, is critical to be able to make an intelligent pairing, whether that's overseen by, you know, the, the clients or, or by AdExact or eventually at some point, you know, it's on our roadmap. So it is a CMS, but really ultimately it's a DSP, SSP. And so what you're doing here is you are putting the power in your own hands to make a choice as to whom you want to reach and layer in all of the traditional DOOH criteria. What's the venue, what's the screen type, right? But you can now throw in the advertising type and the content type. to go along with that. A lot of examples of how this might play out. One of which is, it's actually quite exciting is the ability to take portrait content that you might see or portrait advertising that you might see in social, right? So, and to be able to social oriented content with portrait oriented, social oriented advertising, portrait oriented content on those types of screens, right? The portrait oriented screen. To this point really hasn't been available broadly, but that's kind of one of the wonderful things about DOOH is that there's heterodoxy with, you know, among all the screen. So what this really does is it starts to break down functionally the walls that exist between buying digital out of home versus buying other platforms. You want to make it simple enough to transact and to say, yes, I want to run my campaign utilizing these screens. Nobody's trying to hide the fact that these are digital out of home screens, but nevertheless, those screens provide the same eyeballs that you're looking for. And with the content adjacency, they provide the same level of context. And you know, we're, we're, we're able to use the latitude, longitude, location, specific location to actually tell you where the ad played. It provides a substantial overlap of the traditional parameter passbacks that, that you would expect from connected television, from social, from all of the other platforms that you provide.

Tim Rowe: Yeah. I think some walk us through it. An example. How, how do I, how do I.

Rob O'Rourke: Yeah, sure. So let's say you're right. And you're buying for, we use an example of a brand, let's say New Balance shoes. And you have a team that buys on social media, but you also buy CTV. And then you have a team that buys DOOH. You now could say, we want to plug in all of our buying outlets to buy not only CTV, but we also want to buy DOOH from every team. So every team can buy digital home if they want, because they can make it adjacent to content. So your social media team can say, hey, we're going to click on the option which you have with us to link your Instagram account to your buy. You can use that same content creatives pair it with your buy and now run it in Boston for the new balance for the Boston marathon. Keeping that same creative, just moving those dollars over and expanding the budget into DOOH versus only using digital at home budget. You can now carry it over, make it very easy at your fingertips on our platform, logging in. So said agency will have their own login. They can go in there. create their account, plug in their creative, select the screens across all over Fulton street, downtown. And they want to make sure everyone's there and have a great campaign, but also pair it with their Instagram campaign, as well as with everything on CTV and everything later they're buying. It could all be done at once, but you can use the same creative and use the same dollars.

Tim Rowe: I can definitely see that being, being attractive and interesting to a lot of folks. Are these, are these your own screens? Is this an owned and operated network or are you plugging into existing supply? How does, has this, where do the screens come from?

Stephen Brooks: We actually have a pretty substantial SSP network representing over 300,000 screens, so that puts us in the top five of US networks. And of course, we're expanding as well. Our focus on expansion is really to be able to to accommodate this type of product, this type of content plus ads. So that means you're going to have to have a substantial enough screen size that the content is noticeable, a good footprint, but also be sound enabled. That's kind of a critical part of it. So yeah, so where that's another advantage is, you know, you're not just going point to point with some of the other, what I would call, CTV friendly publishers, of which there are several, but it's actually the ability to buy all of them in one buy. And I, and I think Tim, what this comes down to is a single word, which is Omnichannel. Omnichannel is coming. It's really upon us, but Omnichannel is really only possible if you're able to buy through a single portal. And otherwise what you have is, you know, in the analogy that I would use is you've got a freeway. where traffic is going at 65 or 70 miles an hour, and then you have a service road that's running parallel to it.

Tim Rowe: Traffic's moving. Sometimes someone's listening to this sitting in traffic, and they're like, man, I wish I was going 65. Right.

Stephen Brooks: I live in LA, and we get- Oh, so you know. We get 65 miles an hour between the hours of two and three in the morning and otherwise, no chance. But the analogy there of there being a service road that runs parallel, but it doesn't really intersect. And so you're not really easily able to, for instance, mid-campaign optimize among and between channels. You're still getting the kind of the reporting that you expect the endemic reporting from each of these channels, but the ability to reuse creatives between channels is critical. The ability to, to actually optimize between channels also critical. And, you know, I mean, frankly, all of the screens that you're targeting have the same ability to play content plus ads, which is what we're all used to as consumers anyway. And we know it works. There's a, you know, several hundred year track record.

Tim Rowe: And if I could maybe walk us through, sorry, go ahead, add that, add, add your, I want to add things we touched on that are very important about this to clarify.

Rob O'Rourke: This is DOOH screens. We're not pretending to be anything else. We're not passing back any hidden. Fast tags here. We're outwardly saying to buyers. These are DOOH screens in bars. They're in retail. They're on the street. They're in sports arenas. They're in shopping centers. They're going to be in elevators everywhere. So we have all the vendors you can think of. Tim, there's there and all those. Avenues, we're just opening the door to the buyers from the CTV side and the social side. So the SSPs and the DSPs that buy just CTV now have an abundance of demand. They're looking to pair that. with an outlet. We're giving them an outlet, but they have a roadblock is that one of the major roadblocks is that they need content adjacency and they need measurement and footfall traffic. We're offering that to them to curate their avenue of hearing. content adjacency, and curate what content they want to be next to. It's not just random content running, but there's going to be a list that they can pick from. They can say, I want to be next to highlights from last week's TGA tour, and Calway Golf wants to run. And they can come in now and put a budget toward that, and run it in bars, and run it in airports, and run it at a checkout area at the grocery store if they want to. So I just want to make that very clear. This is all transparent. You know what you're buying. You can select your screens. You can pick it. You can pick where you want it to be and then parent whatever content you want. That's very important to make very clear. There's no hidden agenda here. There's no hidden, you know, what am I buying? What am I actually getting? What content is this running adjacent to? It's out in the open. It's curated and it's right there for you to really offer a tremendous ROI on all of your buys. So I'll make that very, very clear.

Tim Rowe: No, I appreciate you, you adding that context. Cause that was one of the questions I hadn't. Stephen, maybe you can walk us through the, the technicals. How am I selecting the content? Am I selecting the content? Is the content already on the screens and, and walk us through how the content is being curated. Where, what are the sources of content and how is it actually getting placed against my ad? Maybe walk us through that. Sure.

Stephen Brooks: So we have a number of different sources of content, some of which are exclusive, relationships with content owners. We've got content, you know, across the board in sports, cooking slash culinary, lifestyle, multicultural, weather, you know, it kind of runs the gamut. So we have multiple sources, thousands of hours of video, quite literally. It's all searchable. keyword search, pull down menu, what kind of content are you looking for? Great, I'm looking for sports. Ultimately, you're going to be able to select among a dozen, two dozen different clips that meet the search criteria that you have. Because you as the buyer, you know what your ad creative is and you have an idea of what content is most relevant. most timely, you know what those conditions are that meet your needs for the specific campaign. This is all in the campaign setup process, which is user directed. So once you've gotten to that screen, you've pulled down, you've entered your keyword search, you've You've selected any number of clips that may work. If it's a multi-week, multi-month campaign, you might want to refresh content every couple of weeks, or you might want to have multiple pieces of content running. As soon as you activate our backend engine, it fuses the the piece of content to your ad creative and creates a pair. And essentially that pair then gets serviced out appropriate to the venue. You can actually choose which content and add pairings go to which venues or which, uh, which environments, you know, whether that be, you know, again, a portrait or a landscape aspect ratio, uh, for the screen or, or anything else, right. It could be a, uh, it could be a geographically limited piece of content, right? You could have. you know, the Philadelphia Eagles running in Philadelphia and you can have the Pittsburgh Steelers running in Pittsburgh. So ultimately all that happens at that point is, you know, you've, you've got these content pairs, you want to send the campaign into live mode and that's it. You order it, you've got a budget and it runs.

Tim Rowe: Rob, what's the feedback been like? I know this is a new product that's being brought into the market, but I know you're already having conversations with marketers, with media buyers. What's the feedback? What are the things that you're hearing? Is this another step that adds more work? Or is this something that solves the real problem?

Rob O'Rourke: This is supposed to make life easy for buyers and planners. Uh, and that's how it's pitched and that's how it's being received. Uh, I want to preface. I just came back from the media post conference down in Austin. So excuse my voice. It's a little scratchy today. Uh, it was put on a great show. I've just got a party girl voice. Yeah, seriously. And, uh, but important is that they put on a great conference and I was able to speak to lots of media buyers and agencies down there and talk to them. So, um, as a result of that. The scratchiness is what we have, but it's received well and everyone wants to learn more. They're like, Oh, as soon as then it, they go, well, let's come in. Can you present this to my team and show them how to use it? And what it's going to do is going to open up more budgets from our buying teams. So, um, earlier team, I was just at the DPA event last week and it was held at group M and group M was talking about how. They are joining together and converging all their buying teams across all platforms. So there's no longer just one team that buys DOOH. All teams now talk about buying all types of media together. This is like the perfect resource for them to use because now that someone who was used to buy only CTV can go on there and say, oh, I'm going to use this platform AdExec to buy my DOOH because it has the aspects I'm used to when I buy CTV. And now that we're all kind of being intertwined budget wise, let's go on there. This is, I'm so used to buying media this way. I can now go buy digital home that I now need to buy. Pairing it with content, pairing it with contextuality, and then It's a fun, exciting buy, so it's not harder. It makes it more straightforward, easy. And as Stephen said, you go in there, you click the content, you select it, the relevancy, the buy comes up, it shows you your CPMs. It's bought on CPM basis. You can pair your budget to it, and then you get a PDF, send it over to your team to review. If you want to do it, click buy, and you can be up and live within six hours, 12 hours.

Tim Rowe: Well, it sounds easy enough to use. Yeah. Stephen, you talked about omni-channel, Robbie talked about foot traffic reporting. How does the, how does the measurement and reporting piece come together? Steven, I'll, I'll volley that one over to you, but how does it from an omni-channel standpoint, how does it all integrate?

Stephen Brooks: Right. I mean, there's debate within DOOH as to, you know, whether to maintain, I guess you would say the traditional football traffic, you know, multiplier lexicon, right. The, the, the, the methods of reporting back or whether to try to conform to the extent possible to the, you know, the parameter passbacks, the metrics that are that are traditionally collected in other channels. We tend to think that for Omnichannel, you need to conform a bit more to what people are expecting. The easiest one of these is reporting back the context of the content. It's simply what people are expecting. When you go to a website, you need to know what that website is all about. When you're listening to a podcast, you want to know what the podcast content is, right? So all of the genres and descriptive information related to that content. So we absolutely think it's essential to be able to pass that information back for tracking. Everything else, as you get progressively closer and closer, there's an interesting dynamic that's going on right now where connected television, for instance, is increasingly the content for connected television is consumed on devices other than television. So we're not just talking about bars and restaurants, we're talking about mobile screens. You know, whether it's Netflix or Disney Plus or YouTube, right, or any other major platform, the proportion of that content that's being consumed and obviously the advertising that's being viewed on mobile screens just continues to climb. So with the breakdown of certain expectations for reporting that are tied to the home, we actually think that's an advantage for DOOH, right? If we're going to free ourselves from those requirements, then let's all collectively start thinking about what types of parameters are common to all different types of screens. And we're, we're all in on that.

Tim Rowe: Rob, Rob, what's the, what's the reporting that brands are looking for buyers? What are they asking for?

Rob O'Rourke: I mean, I don't think it's just as Chris, what one they're looking for. Um, they want to know who they reach, right? So, uh, feedback and who you reach is a major part of all campaigns, uh, whether you're using, um, Someone who's geofencing a campaign that they're doing in a certain state and getting down granular to just even the retail environment they're in, the checkout area they're in, or what airport they're in, what terminal they're in. That's also important, right? So everyone wants to know who they're reaching. I think it's hard for me to define. in a micro level what they're looking for, I think they want it all. So you need to be able to put it all on a macro level because all buyers want something different. So for me to just say what they're looking for right now is going to be, oh, they just want to know who came in to Piggly Wigglies and bought Campbell's Soup and what the age demographic was and who they voted for. I can't say in person. They want to know it all. And You got to be able to kind of give them options. So we're not gonna be working with just one audience partner, multiple ones that we can layer in there for contextual relevance across the audience measurement. And that's one of the things I hate about and kind of what Stephen and you touched on in our pre-interview where we might be able to use AI on some levels to get there.

Tim Rowe: Yeah, because I think one of the holes, obviously, in CTV reporting is content adjacency being solved for here. And one of the advantages that DOOH has, OOH at large, really, is the ability to report delivery. Consistently real time reporting on your ad played an estimate of how many people were potentially in front of it now bundled together with the content that it played next to that. That's a complete. So when we have these conversations about how do we bridge the gap between digital out of home and CTV, it's. It is those it's bringing all of those pieces together versus. Force feeding one narrative and hoping people buy it. Yeah. It definitely sounds like you guys are on the, on the right path there. We're going to just take a quick break and come back and talk a little bit of news before we take that break. Stephen, go ahead. At that point.

Stephen Brooks: Yeah, really quickly, one other advantage to DOOH that doesn't get talked about a lot is just fraud is, is near zero. It's so, so critically important because recent reports are showing that connected television fraud starts to increase as the proliferation of mobile devices that are, that are playing out that CTV experience. You know, it's the ability to mimic that experience on DOOH. with content adjacency, but without all of the fraud that comes with, you know, opening the, you know, opening the, the, the sourcing is, is, you know, is a distinct advantage. And I think that's, you know, that's something that needs to be taken into consideration.

Tim Rowe: I think as we get more traction in the space, fraud is going to become, look, where the money goes, the eyeballs follow. Obviously we've got lots of good eyeballs, but I think as the money continues to move to our side of the table, there's going to be a higher standard and how you answer those questions can be critically important. We'll be right back with a little bit of news. Hey, would you like to measure your digital .home campaigns just like everything else that you do? Measure things like web lift, conversion, foot traffic, ROAS, all in one place? If so, I'm gonna encourage you to check out Accretiv Outcomes. Because with Accretiv, you'll be able to understand which formats and markets are working the hardest for your ad dollar. And beyond that, you'll be able to retarget the exposed audiences across premium CTV inventory with direct mail, even with email. It's a complete solution for brands and publishers. So check it out at accretivads.com. And we're back. Welcome back. We are going to do a little bit of a news coverage here. A recent report from view that's V I O H recent report by view. Reveals that 37% of us marketers are shifting their ad spend from other digital channels to programmatic DOOH with programmatic DOOH adoption expected to rise from 29% to 37% in the next 18 months. US investment in programmatic digital out of home is set to increase by 29% aligning with global growth trends. We're seeing 35% in Australia in terms of growth and about a quarter of their campaigns have programmatic integration. What do you guys see driving that trend? Is it cookie lists? Is it privacy? What do you, Rob, I'll give you that one first. What's it's probably a lot of things, but is there one big driver that you see?

Rob O'Rourke: Well, first of all, great to see a little update there from Vue and the JCDecode team over there. Used to be over there working with those guys over in the Empire State Building. So I'd like to see their growth and what they're doing in the programmatic space now. Yeah, they're doing a lot of good stuff. Yeah, I remember a time when I was there, if you said the word programmatic, it was like a curse word, but they fully leaned in and it's great to see. Yeah, it's moving rapidly, right? You know, a lot of people that led the way, you know, people we love over at Vistar and PX and Hivestack and Broadside who Good friends and I'm all, all great people. We work, we work with all of them. So, uh, the adoption and the work that everyone's done. And then also the awareness that, uh, people like Tim and those teams and their marketing teams are doing it in market. Oh, please. We're like family at this point. I mean, I think just overall the market and everyone in it is evangelizing it so well. And people are starting to realize the benefits of it. The audience that can reach, uh, the clutter through and the relevancy it has in your media plans. It's not buying a static billboard, which has great relevance and is an amazing product itself. The programmatic DOOH offers what you can do with CTV and social, but you can also do it in the real world in real time. So people are seeing that, they're seeing the value of it. And I think that we're going to help to that, you know, the word lexicon to kind of elevate. We're going to rise together here where we could start pairing it now with content and roll it out in a direct buy feature. And then it's going to go over to a programmatic year.

Tim Rowe: And I want to correct myself view is an SSP. I think I said DSP there, Stephen, from a technical standpoint, what do you see? Is it programmatic maturity within DOOH from a technical standpoint? What do you think is driving that growth?

Stephen Brooks: I actually think there's two factors, right? And I don't want to sidestep the technical aspect of it, but I think there, there are some trends at work here. The, the long run equilibrium for programmatic outside of DOOH has been about 70%. But for most of that time, we've had cookies and you know, the programmatic is just a super efficient way to, to buy into target, right? You just, you, you know, you're, you're able to reach people in every corner, not just the largest, you know, the largest rooms, but every corner of every room part, because you have that. that targeting mechanism, which now has all but gone away. Widespread cookie use is now turned into walled gardens. I think some of the move into programmatic DOOH is an escape from other digital media, other digital channels, simply because their inherent advantage of being able to reach individuals no matter where they were with certain demographic information or lifestyle information. With that erosion, now you're going for, you know, things like volume, price, and it makes digital .home naturally more attractive. The other piece to it is the programmatic side of digital out-of-home is still very much in its early days. So we don't know yet what the long-run equilibrium is going to be, whether it's going to be in that 70% of ad dollars are going to come through programmatically in digital out-of-home or not. Definitely, we're at a point where the technology is able to absorb. Large spread networks exist, right? You know, SSPs of substantial size are able to participate in the buying and selling, the real-time bidding process. I think that's going to increase. But yeah, I think largely you're looking at number one, a flight from and into our new thing. And number two, the adoption of RTB standards within digital out of home and having the critical mass of large scale networks that can actually deliver substantial amounts of impressions across different screens. Where it ends, we don't know, but you know, if, if I had to put a dollar down, which is my max betting limit, I would say we'll probably get into the spot where the we're moving from the Fuseum to maybe the 60s percentage of total dollars being for Matt.

Tim Rowe: Well, we are here for it. Rob, give us the Latin long. Where do folks learn more about AdExact? Where do they connect? Tell us how to get there.

Rob O'Rourke: Yeah. I mean, listen, we're on LinkedIn. We're on social media. You can reach out to myself, or Stephen, or anyone on our team. You can shoot us an email, shoot me a text, meet me at any of the conferences. I'm going to be out there on a road tour for the rest of the fall and heading into the new year. I'll be down at the next MediaPost event down in Austin, again, the DOOH-focused one. We'll be at Uh, a conference this fall as well. And we'll be hitting up some digit days and programmatic, um, IO this fall in New York city next week. So, you know, most of you guys out there, you got my cell phone or you got my email, drop me a line or you can probably find it in this post and, uh, let's catch up. And, you know, I talked about what we're doing and let's have some fun. Maybe we'll crack a beer or two.

Tim Rowe: Make it easy for everyone to find and connect with both of you. It'll be in the show notes below. We'll link to the, to the website, to your LinkedIn profiles. Everything will be there. Make sure to tune in next week. Chris Kane, Jounce Media. We're going to talk about OpenRTB, which networks are winning, which ones are losing. You got it. You got it. You got to tune in to find out until next time, Rob Stephen. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much, Tim. Thank you so much, Tim. Great job guys.