For many marketers and advertisers, OOH is becoming an integral part of their marketing mix. Despite the increasing adoption of OOH, there’s still a need to educate marketers and advertisers and help them understand how to succeed in the OOH space.
We recently spoke with Brooke Ermogenis, Head of Insight at doohx, to discuss the evolution and future of DOOH, as well as her market-leading online learning platform proudly sponsored by Broadsign. doohx is a series of courses developed to teach media buyers and publishers everything they need to know about DOOH and PDOOH.
Check out Brooke’s insights:
Brooke, you recently launched doohx – your industry education initiative sponsored by Broadsign. Why do you think education should be a priority for DOOH, and why is now the right time to launch doohx?
The future of DOOH is going to look a lot different than the OOH industry has in previous years. That’s not speaking to the format that’s being bought – digital in OOH is hardly a new medium – but rather, it’s the who and how that are drastically shifting thanks to programmatic DOOH coming into the fold.
What was once a siloed and ‘specialized’ medium is now becoming more mainstream in terms of the buyers, with digital agencies, trading desks, and brands now looking to integrate DOOH into their overall media buys. It’s also becoming more dynamic in terms of creative, and in terms of the kind of data that can be used for targeting and triggering campaigns in an intelligent and agile way. That means that everyone who worked in OOH before has a new world of programmatic trading to explore in order to pace with the exponential growth and momentum of the industry. It also means that every media trader out there is more curious than ever to understand DOOH and its possibilities in more depth. Plugging that knowledge gap for OOH specialists to learn more about programmatic OOH and for digital traders to better understand DOOH is what doohx is here to do.
How do you see the OOH industry evolving over the next few years?
People seem to be underestimating what’s happening in OOH at the moment. The introduction of programmatic trading and the accessibility and visibility it brings to DOOH at large is going to completely revolutionize the medium.
More DOOH inventory is becoming available. Add to that the fact that programmatic trading opens up the world of potential DOOH buyers to anyone with DSP access and foundational knowledge of the medium, and you can see how quickly OOH is going to start chewing away at that 5-6% media share – which grossly underestimates the value DOOH brings to the table for brands.
The ability for DOOH to so brilliantly bridge the gap between online and offline, driving online action more effectively than any other medium, is something brands will start to take more advantage of now that it’s so much easier to integrate the medium within their broader strategies. The ability to buy DOOH in a way that allows for cross-platform targeting, use of audience data, and creative executions is truly going to change the game for OOH.
As an industry, we’re always speaking of the ‘holy grail’ of omnichannel activation, and I believe 2022 will bring with it the biggest shift yet into making that a reality as we see PDOOH really come into its own.
Education has been a hot topic in OOH over the years. How have doohx courses been received by the industry as a new form of education coming into the market in a meaningful way?
To be honest, the support has been pretty overwhelming. If you read any study or report on OOH, the elephant in the room in terms of what’s preventing progress has always been education.
When I first started structuring the curriculum, I knew I wanted to partner with industry experts (which so far includes oOh! Media, MiQ, and Awarion to name a few) to get a really robust and well-rounded perspective on the topics. Beyond that, I wanted doohx to be able to make an impact on a global scale, and that’s where our partnership with Broadsign came into play.
The whole team was such huge supporters right off the bat. They came on as our key sponsors early and acted as a sounding board of sorts to really help me define my vision for these certifications. The team also valued my wish to keep doohx independent so that we could offer market and player-agnostic education, which is hugely important to maintain the integrity of the certifications, and have given doohx global visibility through long-established partnerships around the world.
All that seems to have culminated in these fantastic resources that the industry has really responded to. Everyone has been longing for centralized, accessible, robust education that can be used to bring internal teams up to speed, as value-adds to their clients, or as an introduction to the medium for those as yet uninitiated. And that’s exactly what we do at doohx.
There’s been a lot of excitement in the industry over the launch of PDOOH 101. Tell us a bit more about this course.
Having traded PDOOH for the past 5 years across European markets from the publisher side, it always felt like we were fighting a bit of an uphill battle. Luckily for us, it was relatively straightforward to build a robust PDOOH offering very early on. The issue we faced was that the market just wasn’t ready, and we found that the majority of our time was spent educating on the technology at large – what is PDOOH, how does it work, why should you care – rather than our own product.
I don’t believe that people were resisting change, countries like Germany, where I was based, were really ahead of the curve in pushing for adoption. The issue was that there just wasn’t enough information out there, and there was only so much we could offer in each one-hour PDOOH workshop session. Not only that, but people were getting a lot of conflicting information about PDOOH. Every publisher or tech partner used different or contradictory terminology and it wasn’t helping the matter of widespread adoption.
I wanted to create a resource that was scalable, accessible to anyone willing to learn and focus on the medium and technologies themselves. Not ‘what X offers or what Y is capable of’, but what is this programmatic technology, what can it offer, and how does the future look for DOOH on an industry level?
PDOOH 101 is our first certification-grade course that covers the foundations – what is PDOOH, how it works, who the players are, benefits, creating or responding to briefs, deal types and how they’re used, and so on. It’s not only a great introduction for the uninitiated, but a way for active traders to ensure their knowledge aligns on an industry level, and gain insight into how PDOOH is approached in other markets around the world.
What’s next for DOOH? Can you tell us about your new courses?
Our next program, DOOH 101, is live! This course is designed to give a foundational understanding of DOOH to those not familiar with the medium. What the formats are, how they are bought, targeting and measuring your audience, the benefits DOOH brings to your overall media strategy, the possibilities PDOOH brings, and some exciting content on the creative side of things. Check out the preview:
Then comes our most exciting launch – PDOOH Advanced – in early 2022. This is the course I originally wanted to create to start the kind of conversations needed to move the industry forward. Ultimately, the priority became getting the foundations right for as many people as possible globally, but this course will take things to the next level. It will challenge how things are done, start new discussions around how things could evolve in the future, and really dive deep into the technology and what it’s capable of. I’m really excited to share that one!
PDOOH 101 and DOOH 101 are both available through the doohx website – click here to receive a 15% discount
doohx is an educational platform dedicated to demystifying the world of DOOH through certification-grade courses, to drive growth and adoption on an industry level.
