According to a recent report, major media group and investment holding company operates as an out-of-home media company in the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong and has teamed up with another major media company to create the first programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) media in Hong Kong powered by Google Marketing Platform.
The platform provides a comprehensive range of services, from booking placement to the launch of an advertising campaign. One of the media company’s entire outdoor digital media resources will be made available for trading there.
While the Marketing Platform is a demand-side-platform (DSP) that provides trading desks, agencies, and advertisers with transparent measurable results across adverting exchanges, its technologies enable advertisers to reach their target audience on digital media and into the outdoors. For instance, different images could be shown depending on weather, time and other parameters, which has been applied to ads for pharmaceutical, retail, technology, and luxury advertisers.
The platform aims to further attract and connect more diversified advertisers to purchase the company’s media resources remotely, especially those keen on using digital media.
The other media company, part of GroupM, WPP’s global media investment management company, is the platform’s initial advertiser among the influential brands worldwide.
The head of interaction for the company’s headquarters in Hong Kong said that the new platform provides advertisers with innovative solutions to connect with the right audience with right messages at the right time along the consumer journey.
The chairman and executive director of the first media company said that this cooperation signifies the OOH industry has entered into a new era, enabling the convergence of the internet and DOOH, and also echoing with the out-of-home (OOH) media company’s online and offline (“O&O”) strategies.
The belief is that programmatic buying is a major future trend and introducing this platform in Hong Kong is in line with the first media company’s pursuit of innovation and development in DOOH as an industry pioneer. With the enhanced programmatic buying capabilities, the company will also continue to optimise its Central Innovation and Technology Unit, and thus offer tailor-made campaigns for its clients enabling the creation of content to achieve an all-win for advertisers, consumers and the company itself.
The media giant aims to add more interactive and customised elements such as bidding systems to the platform as well as secure more digital media resources in order to expand its network.
To understand the significance of this move it is imperative to understand what DOOH is.
A report noted that while Programmatic DOOH can be mystifying at first, the underlying concept is rather straightforward. Simply put, programmatic digital out-of-home is the automation of DOOH sales transactions with the use of computer programs.
This presents a big efficiency gain. With traditional DOOH sales, an advertiser must contact a network owner directly to negotiate the details and terms of the campaign. Pricing, availability, audience targeting and other important variables need to be discussed in advance. Once a deal is made, the network owner must manually schedule the campaign on their network.
Programmatic’s automation removes many of these steps. Instead of needing to negotiate every campaign with the network owner, a media buyer is able to simply access the network’s inventory and book the screens they want, when they want, according to a defined price and established criteria. No need for back-and-forth calls or emails—just a less labour-intensive sales process for both the buyer and the seller.
Though programmatic may seem like a profound shift in the DOOH space, it’s really more of an import of a common online ad sales model.
The same report stated that with market momentum continuing to carry programmatic to greater heights over time. The shift to programmatic in the DOOH space is really just a milestone in a much larger change sweeping over the digital marketing world.
This disruptive technology is the tech that the two media giants seek to leverage to boost the efficiency and reach of advertising in Hong Kong.
