The Future of DOOH Marketing with CEO Burr Smith
Digital Out of Home (ie: DOOH) refers to advertising that is targeted to you outside of your home on the go. Think of billboards, advertisements on top a gas pump, advertisements in waiting areas, etc. We caught up with Burr Smith, the CEO of Broadsign to learn what is coming in DOOH marketing.
Burr Smith is the Chairman, President and CEO of Broadsign. He also serves on the DPAA Board of Directors, and has a keen eye for identifying initiatives that move Broadsign and the digital out of home industry forward.
Chris: What is your “backstory” of how you become involved in the adtech or digital media space?
My initial intro to ad tech was in 2008, just after the start of the financial crisis. My brother and I had been involved in Internet investing, and we saw potential in the digital out of home (DOOH) market. Broadsign initially caught our attention for its DOOH content management system (CMS), so we decided to invest in the company. I was confident DOOH would grow in orders of magnitude, and that was the thesis behind the investment. I joined the Broadsign Board of Directors shortly thereafter and took over as CEO in 2014. Since then, we’ve been developing new tech to automate the DOOH process, and build products that eliminate friction points between ad dollars flowing to publisher screens.
Chris: What do you think is the most interesting thing that has happened to the ad tech industry thus far?
Technology development has completely upended advertising. Google and Facebook have a high concentration of power in reaching audiences online, and changes to their respective ad approaches and algorithms have had a ripple effect on agencies and brands. As a result, we’re seeing an increasing desire within the ad industry to move towards a more automated advertising process, which will in turn allow for more accurate audience measurement and return on investment.
Chris: What are “5 things you think will change or should change over the next 5 years in adtech and digital publishing” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
1. Content Convergence: Looking at ad tech’s current trajectory, advertising will soon be part of the individual’s daily life in a much more intelligent way, and there will be less of a separation between advertising inside and outside of the home. The content individuals see online, on TV and out of home will converge more closely. This shift, however, will not come without privacy concerns that will need to be addressed.
2. Holistic Approach: Ad tech developments in DOOH over the next few years will spur significant disintermediation and changes in the advertising market that will ultimately change how DOOH is addressed. We’ll start to see out of home merge with the larger digital marketing industry. It will no longer be its own independent process, but become a larger part of how an advertising campaign is designed and delivered.
3. Screens at Scale: Publishing a DOOH ad campaign with significant audience reach is currently complex, with displays that are widely dispersed and vary in size and resolution. Furthermore, digital signage networks often operate on proprietary content management systems (CMS) that don’t share common rules, making it difficult to aggregate content across multiple networks of screens. In the next three to five years, this process will improve as new solutions emerge to address these challenges, and Broadsign is among a small group of companies on the supply side moving quickly to develop this technology. With these changes, agencies and brands will be able to execute campaigns across larger networks of screens in creative new ways, publishers will gain access to a larger pool of ad dollars and consumers will see more valuable content in their daily lives.
4. Targeted Content: The quality of data that publishers receive in DOOH will improve with emerging ad tech developments. New camera tracking and geolocation solutions will collect higher quality data for more accurate, relevant audience targeting, while also ensuring privacy and security. DOOH standards will then begin to emerge and closely resemble those already established in online advertising, and DOOH publishers will be able to learn more about audiences in a way that no one currently can.
5. Platform Standardization: A handful of preferred digital ad tech platforms in DOOH will emerge, and the industry will begin to standardize, which will spur dramatic growth for DOOH overall. We’ve seen this happen in other industries, just look at Microsoft Office, Corel’s Word Perfect and Apple’s Pages as an example.
Chris: Tell us something you or your company is doing to stay up to date in adtech (maybe making changes to comply with Better Ads Standards or GDPR, working on your header bidding stack or testing new types of ads)
Broadsign is investing in technology development and initiatives that will drive programmatic forward in DOOH. We’re working with clients and industry partners to build and test new programmatic technology, such as our Broadsign Reach SSP, that aims to transform the way the DOOH industry buys, sells and delivers ads. We want to make it easier for brands and publishers to reach more relevant audiences out of the home with targeted content.
Chris: Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might see this. :-)
I’d like to meet Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. He’s one of the most creative and innovative thinkers in the world. I’d be curious to hear more about his worldview and what he thinks the world will look like 10 years from now.
