Is Edison Interactive The Dark Horse Of DOOH?! And The F Word.

Welcome to OOH Insider, the first podcast for media and marketing executives that connects how offline attention creates online conversion. My name is Tim Rowe and for the past three years, I’ve been interviewing guests about their unique experience in bridging this misunderstood and undervalued opportunity that exists to build long-lasting brands that scale profitably.

Today’s episode is a recap of episode 93 and the conversation that I had with  Nick Haggard. Nick is the Director of Sales at Edison Interactive An out-of-home content management system for connected devices that is really a company that I think you should have on your radar and I’ll explain why in just a moment…

Connect with Nick here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-haggard/

On the first re-listen of the episode with Nick Haggard, I thought I’d be telling you mostly about the cool ad opportunity that is the Edison Interactive Shark Experience.

If you’re not already familiar with the platform, Edison Interactive has built a best-in-class, self-serve platform for a few highly-valuable audiences, once of which is available specifically through the Shark Experience and what that does is put these tablets in golf carts to create a more modern golf experience. This is like golfcart TV if you will and it was purpose-for the modern golfer to showcase things like sports updates and distance from the hole, the cart acting as its own rangefinder if you will with this really cool bit of technology, but on it, brands also have the opportunity to showcase 15-second video creative during the average 4.5 hour round of golf, during which they’re only 1 of 4 advertisers, with a fifth slot reserved in the rotation for the course itself to provide other relevant and helpful content throughout the golfer journey and did you know? 60% of the time a golfer spends on the course is IN the cart!

And with more than 360 courses and 35,000 golf carts already upgraded to include one of these screens, The Shark Experience has a partnership with Club Car, the largest golf cart manufacturer in the country, to continue adding inventory. You only need $500 to get started on edisoninteractiveadmanager.com and you can run ads at a national scale or cherry pick specific courses. 

This, combined with the Alpine Media ski lift tv opportunity, and now other lifestyle-based networks, and after I re-listened to this one a few times, what I came away with was that the real buried lead here is that Edison Interactive may be one of the most exciting digital out of home companies that no one is paying attention to and here’s why - 

Edison Interactive is quietly building some of the most marketer-friendly tech while curating high-value, hard-to-reach networks for its platform. 

They’re building on Google Ad Manager 360 with networks that marketers can confidently buy, knowing that there are only 1-2 people in front of the screen at a given time and thus being able to buy more closely to a ‘per play’ style of impression buying which is actually more similar to programmatic online where one impression equal one ad delivered to one person. In out of home, 100,000 impressions may equal 1 ad play or 1,000 and that’s a vulnerability for programmatic digital out of home, in my opinion, is that when marketers buy programmatic impressions online, what they’re really buying is reach x frequency - the size of an audience that sees an ad times the number of times they see it. When marketers are buying programmatic digital out of home, they’re buying an estimated subset of an estimated total of impressions. What this ultimately means is that programmatic online means buying share of voice - this website has ten spots for ads, my bid won three of them, I have 30% share of voice if this user scrolls all the way to the bottom of the page. Or, put another way, there were 10 opportunities to show an ad on this website, my bid won three of those spots, I got to show my ad three times to the same person. That means my reach is 1, my frequency is 3, and therefore I bid and bought 3 impressions. With out-of-home, I may buy those 100,000 impressions, but what is my reach and frequency? Sure, I can set targets, but it’s all based on estimates anyway. What I really want to know is two-fold - where should I be showing my ads? When should I be showing my ads? And what is my relative share of voice compared to the other advertisers showing ads to that audience at that same place during that same time?

So for those reasons, I think Edison Interactive is a company more people should be paying attention to and talking about because when I don’t know who we’re appointing as an industry to handle the programmatic fraud conversation but Edison Interactive is definitely building to avoid it and that was my real key takeaway after listening to this episode a few times.