Before the onset of technology, media planners had it easy. A few phone calls, a few million dollars, and the buy was done. We all saw Mad Men – those were the good old days.
Today is a different story. A media planners job is far more complicated today than it was on Madison Avenue in the 70s. Consumer behavior has changed, media buys are larger and more integrated, and technology continues to evolve.
It is through this innovation, however, that OOH has reinvented itself and its buying process. Today as media planners select and secure OOH space, automated services streamline the process.
In the case of the recent #VoteToCount public service campaign, which uses in-your-face labels Americans often identify with to encourage voters to get to the polls this year, planning and buying agency Project X collaborated closely with integrated advertising agency Partners+Napier to optimize the campaign for success.
OOH media vendors offered ad space for the campaign through planning software, which organized the resulting 2,500+ ad units into a unified interface where planners then applied demographic data to determine audience-appropriate messaging for each ad placement.
For example, ads reading “Parade-Marching, Rainbow Flag-Waving, Straight Voter” are currently posted in the progressive urban neighborhoods of Downtown Manhattan and San Francisco, while ads that read “Rural, Christian, Pro-Choice Voter” are on display in areas where data suggest a more receptive populace.
New technology like this collapses the once laborious task of building OOH advertising campaigns based on demographics and proximity into a streamlined workflow. This kind of software also features powerful audience targeting tools to help bring greater optimization to advertisers’ OOH campaigns, thereby providing expert OOH ad buying services to brands and agency clients.
With today’s tech platforms, messaging can be optimized across a diverse set of audiences with full transparency into the media landscape, making OOH planning and buying OOH advertising easier than ever.