Trust is a two way street that requires each party to show a genuine commitment to the other’s needs. No, you didn’t accidentally stumble upon a marriage advice column. We are here to talk about how important trust is between marketer and media partner, and how the digital out-of-home (DOOH) industry in particular has been coming up short during the current economic slowdown.
In short, DOOH partners commonly “dead end” in the full-funnel measurement expected from true digital media companies, an important spot along that two-way street of trust.
Marketing leaders trust out-of-home (OOH) campaigns to capture attention and drive awareness as part of their omnichannel strategies. DOOH platforms build on these benefits with more advanced programmatic buying and targeting options, screens that support eye-catching motion and APIs that trigger dynamic creative updates based on everything from the weather to live sports scores.
But DOOH has been slow to expand the range of available reporting metrics and the speed with which they are provided to advertisers. In this moment of decreased consumer spending, marketers are placing their trust in channels that deliver measurable and impressive returns.
This does not bode well for (most) DOOH platforms.
Marketers, you have the right to demand digital capabilities from your DOOH partners, especially during this time of increased scrutiny on your marketing results. So to help you identify them, consider our three “must haves” for evaluating DOOH partners.
1. Does your DOOH partner reach the right audience? Though we’re focusing on measurement, I’d be remiss to not start out with the most important part of marketing: the consumers you’re trying to reach. Without the ability to reach the right audiences, any metric your partner provides is useless. After all, you need quality inputs to get quality outputs.
Different environments narrow or broaden the types of audiences you’ll reach. Airports provide an access point to all walks of life. Here, young families, college students, business travelers and solo adventurers all are within elbow distance of each other. Depending on what you’re advertising, this could be optimal or hindering.
On the other hand, CPG brands that rely on retail stores for sales benefit by reaching their customers as close to the point of purchase as they can. That’s why Volta's dual EV charging and media stations are positioned steps away from the entrances of popular commercial locations and retail properties. We provide advertisers a direct line of communication with their target consumers right before they grab a shopping cart.
Your partner should also have data-driven audience targeting capabilities that enable you to refine which inventory within its media network your campaign should target. At Volta, we enable this through companies like Experian, helping to identify the best locations to reach the ideal demographic and psychographic shopper profiles.
2. Can your partner measure what matters most? As Catalina’s Tiffany Southwell recently declared, “There’s no be-all-end-all metric when it comes to measuring the success of an out-of-home campaign.” With such a range of possible metrics available—in-store sales, driving more website traffic, creating awareness of a newly launched product and more—it’s critical that you find the partner who can deliver on the metric that’s most important to you.
Incremental sales, ROAS, attributable site traffic and foot traffic are all crucial measurements for performance-minded marketers. Without them, the business impact of a campaign cannot be determined. At Volta, we work in collaboration with third-party data and attribution firms like IRI, Nielsen, Catalina, and Quotient, to support this suite of full-funnel measurement options.
To save yourself a lot of stress in the long run (and potentially even your job), make sure your provider partners with measurement firms with a trusted track record of delivering these hard metrics.
3. Do they have metrics that match their environment? Now that we've talked about screening partners based on their audience and measurement capabilities, let's bring these “must-haves” together: In short, your media partner must have measurement expertise that matches the audiences and environments you're targeting.
Out-of -home inventory is far-reaching—bus shelters, taxi toppers, TVs in golf carts, billboards, even fields of crops under popular flight paths. Each of these environments carries with it a different contextual relevance and predictable consumer behavior, creating distinct opportunities. Say your campaign is running inside a commuter train car; naturally, your audience probably will be on their phones. The ability for your partner to measure attributable mobile website visits should be a requirement.
When planning a DOOH campaign as part of your digital omnichannel strategy, consider the context of that inventory and what its advantages are. For you to be successful, the pieces have to fit together like a puzzle. Your partner’s measurement capabilities have to match the context just as much as your creative does.
It’s vital you find that trustworthy provider that can live up to every promise. Your partner needs to be able to measure what you're monitoring, its environments need to make sense for your goal and it needs to be able to tie it all together for easy reporting against your customer data.
Marketers, make sure your DOOH partners are measuring up.
About Volta
Volta, a member of the Shell Group, is an industry-leading electric vehicle EV charging and media company. Volta's unique network of charging stations powers vehicles and drives commerce, delivering value today while building the EV infrastructure of tomorrow. Volta offers benefits to site partners, cities, brands and consumers by installing charging stations that feature large-format digital advertising screens located steps away from the entrances of popular commercial locations. Retailers can increase shoppers’ spending, advertisers can precisely target audiences, and EV drivers can charge their vehicles seamlessly as they go about their daily routines. Volta's extensive network leverages its proprietary PredictEV platform, which uses behavioral science and machine learning technology to help commercial property owners and cities plan EV infrastructure intelligently, efficiently and equitably.
