“OOH Canada” — A Programmatic Journey in our Home Country
Celebration isn’t a word most of us will associate with the year 2020. The disruption caused by COVID-19 forced the world into a full stop, followed by thoughtful contemplation about the future. In fact, in recent months, the idea of success has almost become synonymous with survival. However, as we’ve come to learn, extraordinary times often lead to exceptional opportunities.
Today is Canada Day.
It’s always been a time for people and businesses to look back on our past and highlight the strides we’ve made to improve our present and future. For us, the past few months have been about innovating and leveraging programmatic DOOH to its full potential. Our team maintained focus on doing what they do best, developing state-of-the-art technology that would allow us to visualize the current state of OOH audience movement patterns. In a time of crisis, the more information you can provide, the more likely you are to make the right decisions and we were up to the challenge.
Here’s what we have to celebrate:
A Special Relationship with our Home Market: Canada
Even though we have a global presence in Japan, Singapore, Germany, UK, Australia, US and Canada, Hivestack calls Montreal home. When we began our programmatic journey, our focal point was on the supply-side of the business and we worked closely with a handful of media owners across the country.
Only 11 short months ago, we went full-stack and began venturing into the buy-side of programmatic DOOH. Our key partnership with KineticCanada put Hivestack on the buy-side map. Our tech rose to the occasion and demonstrated our ability to leverage mobile data intelligence to target real-world physical behaviour and drive measurable business outcomes.
The Kinetic Canada partnership was a game-changer for Hivestack’s Canadian business. It created a domino effect where more suppliers signed onto our SSP to get a piece of Kinetic’s awesome budgets, which fanned the flame to having more buyers choosing Hivestack as their DSP.
By quickly consolidating the entire DOOH supply chain in Canada, Hivestack was able to provide a unified and world-class OOH buying and measurement technology to a fast-growing channel.
Less than a year into our journey, the rapid adoption of programmatic technology means we’ve onboarded almost all Canadian media owners. The Hivestack DSP is now the leading programmatic DOOH DSP in Canada and drives, by far, the most programmatic DOOH revenue in the country.
Innovating for Marketers During a Crisis
Setting the scene in early March of this year, the development of the pandemic came swiftly across the entire country. Rather than sitting back and waiting for answers, our team identified the potential of leveraging our full-stack ad tech platform.
We used our creativity to deliver actionable insights to our clients during a time when DOOH was being hit hard and there was a lack of available resources. Furthermore, we developed a comprehensive strategy to solve a problem we’ve never faced in our lifetime: all of a sudden, out-of-home audiences became scarce.
This request was brought to both our data science and production teams in order to establish a proof of concept. One week later, the Hivestack COVID-19 Dashboard was born. And marketers loved it.
Below are a few ways we were able to achieve this with the Hivestack COVID-19 Toolset for Hivestack buyers.
1. We helped marketers carefully target consumers on DOOH screens during heavily reduced audience movement periods.
We used custom data science to understand decreased outdoor movement, and which DOOH screens were impacted the least.
Our tech found pockets of inventory that were still seeing meaningful traffic (e.g. screens in grocery stores and outdoor journeys to hospitals). Canadian buyers used Hivestack’s DSP during the peak of COVID-19 lockdowns to only activate screens that demonstrated a threshold of minimum traffic as per the data science.
Put succinctly, we helped marketers buy the impressions that matter most in a time of crisis, and helped eliminate unwanted and costly spill impressions.
2. We monitored changes in venue and roadside visitation which helped marketers target niche audiences on DOOH, independent of media format.
Throughout the most intense quarantine periods, the Hivestack DSP bidder was guided by data science that identified time-based peaks and valleys of potential impressions. For example, different times of the day saw a greater concentration of audiences at grocery stores, while other times of the day saw a greater concentration of audiences near roadside billboards.
The Hivestack DSP has the ability to fluctuate the bid price on bid requests from DOOH screens based on a fluctuating density of audiences around the screens.
Moreover, the Hivestack platform seamlessly shifted activations in and out of different DOOH formats based on COVID-19 influenced movement patterns, while shifting creative to optimize delivery against movement patterns while “chasing” a reduced audience.
3. We helped the Government sector target consumers on DOOH that were not exhibiting social distancing patterns.
Hivestack’s team came up with the idea of using custom data science to understand what devices were not exhibiting social distancing patterns.
A custom algorithm was developed by Hivestack to (a) determine the home origin of an anonymous device ID, and (b) understand whether that anonymous device was persistently observed in proximity to other anonymous devices that did not belong to the same household. Such devices were deemed to not be exhibiting social distancing and became the “custom audience”.
The Government sector was particularly interested in using Hivestack to understand how this niche audience moved around, and when they appeared in high concentration in the viewshed of a DOOH screen.
Promoting Canadian Talent, on Canada Day!
We’re also very proud to announce today, on Canada Day, the promotion of two key Canadian Hivestackers, Ben Bookbinder as VP of Sales, Canadaand Michelle Bodnar as VP Global Publisher Development. Both have played instrumental roles in helping Hivestack exponentially grow its demand and supply business in Canada in 11 short months.
We asked Ben and Michelle what makes them optimistic about programmatic DOOH in Canada:
Ben shared: “The traditional OOH experts are now fully harnessing the power of data to target their audiences in smarter ways, and utilizing traditional programmatic tools to accomplish new KPI’s and achieve greater business outcomes. While we have accomplished so much during my time at Hivestack, the future is still blindingly bright with huge opportunities to continue to create impact.”
Michelle commented: “Canadian media owners were early adopters of programmatic strategies compared to similar markets in the UK and Australia. Several leading operators in Canada made early bets on good tech like Hivestack and as a result are in a stronger position today to easily withstand the tides of our rapidly changing world.”
Canada, the Best is Yet to Come
Having laid the groundwork over the past few years and continuing to focus our energy on identifying pockets of opportunity where marketing meets computer science has allowed us to seize opportunities under any circumstances. Good or bad, we find innovations for our Canadian partners.
Times are changing, as they always do, but the speed and flexibility of our platform played a major role in our ability to weather the COVID-19 storm and come back stronger than ever. We might not be out of it yet, but we’ve now equipped Canadian marketers with our COVID-19 toolset so they can be as precise as possible when programmatically activating and measuring DOOH.
Please join us in celebrating our Canadian buyers, our Canadian media owner partners, our Canadian data partners and our amazing, pink-loving team in Canada.
Happy Canada Day, eh!
To learn more about Hivestack, visit our website: https://hivestack.com/
