Grown from a simple idea in 2015 to advertise everywhere, Adomni (a mashup of “advertise omnipresent”) is driven to find ways to make digital out-of-home advertising easy for everyone – from Fortune 500 agencies to regional ad buyers. Through partnerships with supply-side platforms like Broadsign Reach, Adomni DSP (demand-side platform) has access to more than 450,000 screens globally, and is on target to reach 600,000 screens by the end of 2021. We spoke with co-founder and CEO Jonathan Gudai about Adomni’s mission and services, how to best use DOOH in your next advertising campaign, and the future of digital OOH advertising.
Making digital OOH networks accessible for all
Adomni primary goals are: to make digital OOH ad networks accessible and purchasable to digital marketers, to help them achieve better outcomes for their brands. Their co-founders have experience in e-commerce and software for major brands, with a passion for customer service.
Be everywhere, be unmissable
Since day one, Adomni has focused on working with as many supply partners as possible. Working with more than 150 unique media owners and publishers with inventories on the platform, Adomni can target almost half a million screens around the world, with 80-90% of those screens in the US. Their inventory spans 40 different screen formats, from small screens in your local convenience store to Times Square mega screens.
“Wherever you can imagine a high traffic area, whether it’s a store, a roadway, train station or airport, we have screens that we can access through our partners,” explains Jonathan.
This vast inventory allows Adomni to work with advertisers who are looking to advertise in one specific location, or global clients like UFC looking to launch their next pay-per-view campaign.
Recently, Adomni partnered with Uber to create a unique opportunity for drivers to have a new revenue stream. “Uber OOH,” the company’s new advertising network, launched in Atlanta, Dallas and Phoenix in 2020. Similar to taxi tops in Chicago or New York, the car-top ads are powered by Adomni’s cloud-based technology and can help brands achieve 360-degree penetration in a market. Uber OOH recently launched in New York City, giving brands exposure to more than 18 million eyes on this innovative platform.
“Someone gets picked up by an Uber OOH and there’s an ad on the car. That ad is driving through the city, exposing vehicles and pedestrians to that ad. That same ad can be shown on an urban panel and billboards, providing further exposure for your message,” says Jonathan.
“It’s allowing brands to reach audiences everywhere, in an unmissable way.”
Brand marketing or performance marketing?
Marketers may often wonder if digital OOH is a brand marketing channel or a performance marketing channel. Jonathan’s answer might surprise you. As he explains in the clip below, it’s time for the industry to “re-contextualize how people think about performance marketing to focus more on results as opposed to performance reports.”
Demonstrating what’s possible
For demand-side platforms like Adomni, there is an important education process that needs to happen with marketers and media buyers over the next 24 months.
“There is a major gap in understanding with the digital programmatic buyers,” says Jonathan. “They don’t know about Adomni or Broadsign Reach as a channel that can be bought and sold like their mobile and other programmatic digital.”
For Adomni, this opens doors for the ultimate growth potential. Through education, the industry can pull back the curtain, showing both digital programmatic buyers and traditional advertising buyers that digital OOH is available to them now, and it is easy to incorporate into current or future campaigns.
“Whether customers already have experience with audience targeting or proximity radius, or they want to do their digital OOH buying all in one place, or they want to evolve their offerings, once they realize what is possible, it’s hard to go back to the old way.”
(PS: Time for a little plug: If you want to level up your programmatic DOOH skills, check our our Programmatic U for buyers and test your skills with our lite certification quiz)
Is it easy? Does it work?
For years, buying digital OOH ads was a process. Advertisers had to contact a salesperson to book the campaign, you didn’t know when it was going to go up or when it was going to come down, and the process was very cumbersome. Additionally, it was also hard to measure results. With the introduction of programmatic digital OOH, things have changed.
- Accessibility: Advertisers now have easy access to the buying platform or website, and the ability to start, modify or finish a campaign at their fingertips, 24/7.
- Targetability: The amount of data available to target a campaign has grown exponentially, allowing advertisers to optimize when and where to show an ad, based on content consumed, and with location data to understand a consumer’s history of where they have been.
- Measurability: Up until now, OOH was sold on estimated impressions or spots sold, and typically wasn’t considered a measurable performance channel. Partnering with Adomni or Broadsign Reach allows agencies and advertisers to add digital OOH into their media mix, look at click-through rates and conversion rates, or even add on an attribution report that will show the exposed audience and the impact that audience had on the campaign.
Ultimately, it boils down to two questions: Is it easy? Does it work? According to Jonathan, OOH couldn’t really answer these two questions convincingly, but in the last 18 months that has changed, “and we can now compete on a level of the other big platforms with the accessibility, the targetability, and the measurability.”
The recipe for success = relevance
As with any great ad campaign, marketers are trying to be in the right place, at the right time, to reach an audience with the right message. But where to start?
Figure out the goals of your campaign, as well as your typical customer and their characteristics. How can you use digital OOH screens most optimally? Jonathan explains that you need to find the places and times where your audiences are present – where does your audience spend their time (e.g., sports bars, shopping centers, convenience stores)?
Once you’ve figured that out, you can build your creatives for those times and locations. If it’s not working, you can switch the creative out or customize it for specific locations, to ensure you remain relevant to the audience at all times.
Think about it: it’s Friday at 5 p.m. The big game is on tonight. And you want to get your new sports betting app in front of men aged 18-45. Throw up some ads in the liquor store or convenience store, where he will be buying some snacks and beverages for his friends while they watch the game. Include the game time and the teams playing, as well as recent stats, and those men will be more likely to download your app when they get home.
It’s all about being contextually relevant.
What’s next for the industry?
2020 was a year of change for the advertising industry. But it was a year in which media owners became stronger, and operations became more efficient. For the programmatic marketers, the industry is coming out on top and more resilient than ever.
What about privacy?
And what about Google’s recent announcement for a ‘privacy-first web’ that will stop third-party tracking cookies and or other trackers in the Chrome web browser? Or the new Apple IOS 14.5 update with IDFA changes, in which apps must now request user permission “if an app collects data about end users and shares it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and websites”
According to Jonathan, attribution has always been difficult for digital marketers. The announcement does hurt programmatic and digital buyers who are looking at reports and trying to make intelligent decisions from the data supplied. Now more than ever, marketers will need to trust the location intelligence providers that the data supplied is accurate.
“Consumers are still opting in, and they will continue to opt-in because they know they won’t have the best experience with an app if they don’t,” he says. “This is especially true for online millennials. Generally, there isn’t a severe concern from the data providers, and we take our cues from them.”
But what does it all boil down to? It pushes us, as marketers, to do good marketing.
This is the first of a series of interviews that we are going to be conducting with DSP and agency partners. We hope you enjoyed our premiere edition with Adomni!
If you’re interested to learn more about programmatic DOOH, we’ve recently made available on-demand our recorded webinars from our OOH from Home series.
