Digital Out of Home (DOOH)

What is Digital Out of Home?

DOOH refers to ads, content, and video showcased outside the home. The message delivery is supported by rich and dynamic digital technology, maximized with real-time capabilities to target consumers on-the-go. DOOH encompasses a variety of screen shapes, sizes, and levels of interactivity. From digital billboards and signs atop taxis, to place-based digital messaging at airport gates, gyms and waiting rooms, DOOH provides a bridge between context and location. It ranks high in relevance and favorable recall—vital components of any media campaign, due to its high level impact and flexibility, relevant to each unique environment, public or private, outside the home.

How can Brands use DOOH?

Transact in real-time: Digital signage can broadcast the halftime score, post happy hour specials, unveil new album art, share tweets, and disseminate emergency broadcasts to keep communities informed.
Be contextually relevant: Localization has always been a core component of outdoor advertising and this has increased trifold with day-parted messaging, traffic monitors, and weather feeds. For example, advertisers can share the pollen count in surrounding areas, offering a value to drivers, and reinforcing their product as a solution.
Integrate personalization: Who doesn’t love seeing their photo on a big screen – especially on a billboard in Times Square? Campaigns that enable consumers to connect with friends and family members, via photos that appeal to our selfie-side, make an instant connection but also offer a valuable keepsake.
Create unique experiences: Transit shelters were once places to pace and text your friends while you waited for your train or bus. Today, a consumer can shop for groceries, play trial video games, and virtually interact with products.
Measure relentlessly: With mobile’s omnipresence, we are now able to track a consumer’s journey and exposure to digital signage and their actions afterwards. Did they visit a store after being exposed to digital signage? Were they more likely to purchase or recommend a product? Location based mobile research (including opt-in mobile surveys), foot traffic studies, and cross-channel attribution is providing additional data to optimize outdoor campaigns.

DOOH Formats

Large Formats are designed and elevated for clear viewing, generally more than 50 feet, and are typically found on highways, high traffic commercial, industrial, and major metropolitan areas. This format delivers high impact exposure and is available in a wide range of markets
Spectaculars are considered high impact units with full motion, often targeting pedestrians in heavy foot traffic areas such as Times Square and Downtown Los Angeles, and also include iconic districts such as Sunset Strip.
Venue Based and Public Spaces typically focus on targeting pedestrian traffic and are commonly found at street level or within a venue. Examples include displays found within municipal properties, health clubs, airports, office buildings, taxi cabs, etc.
Custom Formats complement robust large and small DOOH networks, creating custom opportunities typically used for events and pop-up installations. These formats can range from digital projections, to digital mobile billboards/buses, to empty storefronts that are transformed to create interactive digital experiences using gesture and touchscreen technologies.

Buying Practices

DOOH media is a time-based medium, with pricing largely based on impressions and/or share of voice (SOV). Location can also be used to buy inventory in proximity to a specific point of interest. A typical digital billboard has eight slots in a loop, each 8 to 10 seconds long. Each advertiser receives ⅛ SOV when all of the inventory is sold. To gain a larger SOV, advertisers can buy multiple slots within the same loop. Based on the rating system used for a particular type of digital inventory, the overall estimated impressions will be calculated over a specified period of time (four weeks is common). Rates may be based on a variety of factors including location and demand. Traditionally, out-of-home media plans are created based on four strategic factors location (CBSA/DMA) or proximity to point-of-interest, contextual relevance, network, and demographics (TAB/Nielsen). As new data sets emerge to describe consumers’ physical world behavior, media buyers will be able to utilize advanced behavioral targeting strategies to reach audiences.

Limitations of DOOH

Due to the vast reaching nature of DOOH, you can’t uniquely target everyone. There may be 2 consumers with completely different wants both looking at your DOOH age, but it may be the case that you can only serve a targeted ad to one of them. This is a limitation that was not previously an issue with standard digital ads on mobile, desktop, etc as there was usually only one set of eyeballs on those.
In order to tailor the ads to the consumer, more dots need to be connected. With ads on mobile or desktop, consumers can be matched to cookies or their device ids and they would be served a targeted ad on the same browser or device that they were using. With DOOH, a visitor may not be using a device at all. The machine showing the DOOH ad must be able to somehow connect the dots to find what person is viewing the ad through wi-fi scraping, location information via a mobile app, or some other identification method.
Limited amount of screens. Because DOOH screens are so large and only in public areas, there are much fewer DOOH screens than standard screens. This is one of the reasons why buying DOOH is a lot more costly than buying standard programmatic media.

A Glance at DOOH Providers and Delivery Formats