How Pepsi Max used programmatic digital out-of-home to retarget fans
the challenge
Tesla and Edison, Sherlock and Moriarty, Star Wars and Star Trek; the world is packed with epic rivalries, but perhaps none as iconic as Pepsi and a certain red rival. Wanting to settle things once and for all, Pepsi MAX needed a marketing campaign that truly set them apart.
In a two-step campaign, Pepsi MAX started by setting up stations across the Netherlands where people were encouraged to take a blind taste test comparing two beverages. This classic and immersive campaign was a hit and great for brand awareness. Yet Pepsi MAX wanted to extend their reach and push their creativity a step further.
the solution
Using their innovation budget and working with international marketing agency Omnicom, Pepsi devised a plan to retarget taste testers using digital out-of-home. The campaign ran on Exterion Media screens in six malls in Amsterdam, Utrecht, the Hague and Rotterdam. These locations were specifically selected because the malls had a supermarket in them, increasing the relevance of the ad and the likelihood of triggering a purchase.
However, rather than booking every mall screen at all times, the brand tapped into Broadsign DSP partner, Platform 161, for a hyper-targeted and contextual programmatic digital out-of-home approach. When people participated in the tasting challenge, a unique ID was logged from several apps using Resono beacon technology. The digital out-of-home campaign was then triggered instantly when one of these taste testers walked into the mall.
As this took place programmatically, Pepsi MAX only paid for the ad placement when the creative played, making it a targeted and extremely efficient media buy. The moment the ad was triggered, the entire mall network displayed a Pepsi MAX ad for an impactful takeover view.
“The flexibility provided by buying digital out-of-home programmatically enabled us to look at retargeting in a whole new way. The screens were a fresh and creative addition to Pepsi MAX’s campaign.” – Danique Steur, senior programmatic specialist, Omnicom
the results
The result was a highly effective campaign that caught viewers’ attention.
“With programmatic digital out-of-home, we were able to be extremely relevant to our audience without having to spend huge amounts. We’re definitely going to continue to innovate with this type of campaign going forward.” – Michiel Otten, brand manager beverages, PepsiCo.
While mass awareness digital out-of-home campaigns are still an important part of a brand’s marketing strategy, data-driven programmatic campaigns are becoming more frequent, as buyers look to find more efficient and creative ways to share their brand stories.
Product News | October 11, 2021
How Québecor’s DOOH campaigns deliver 99.9% on target with the Broadsign Platform
Advertising is woven into nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Whether you’re scrolling on your phone at home or walking down the street, ads are everywhere. With audiences exposed to such a high volume of messaging, breaking through the noise has never been more critical.
At the core of every successful campaign are two key elements: personalized content that speaks directly to the audience, and a channel that effectively reaches them where they are. Tailored messaging plays a crucial role in building meaningful connections between brands and consumers. According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization 2021 report, 71% of consumers now expect personalization, and 76% are more likely to consider purchasing from brands that deliver it.
When it comes to reaching consumers where they are, few channels do it better than out-of-home (OOH) advertising. By engaging with audiences in the real world, like during a commute, while shopping, or at a live event, the medium delivers messages where consumers can take action. When looking at the effectiveness of personalized content with OOH, Leger and COMMB’s joint research study shows that 51% of its respondents state they enjoy seeing OOH advertisements that are personalized to them.
One media owner that makes it easy for advertisers to deliver personalized content directly to their desired audiences is Québecor. With a combined inventory of over 17,000 static and digital out-of-home (DOOH) assets across all major Canadian markets, Québecor has firmly established itself as a leading force in Canada’s OOH advertising landscape. With its unmatched national reach yet strong local presence, advanced targeting capabilities, and premium inventory, Québecor makes it easy for advertisers to reach a wide variety of audiences across a broad set of points of interest.
Why advertisers love Québecor’s network
Flexible outdoor formats that provide broad reach and hyper-local impact
Québecor OOH offers advertisers a wide range of high-impact DOOH screens across both indoor and outdoor environments. Its outdoor inventory includes large-format static billboards, static and digital bus shelters, digital gas pump screens, mobile static faces on buses, mobile digital screens on taxis, and window displays in pharmacies and convenience stores.
In fact, the Canadian media owner operates the most extensive street furniture network in Quebec, where its headquarters are located. This includes 150 digital bus shelter screens across key cities like Montreal, Sherbrooke, Laval, the South Shore and Lévis, providing targeted and strategic community presence at scale.
One unique offering by Québecor is its Express Video Station network, which is available across Quebec and Ontario. This network features digital screens with audio at gas pumps, allowing advertisers to run 15- to 30-second video ads in a high dwell-time environment, an average of 4 minutes with minimal distractions. The Express Video Station creates a rare opportunity for mass visibility while fostering high-engagement, one-to-one interactions with audiences in a brand-safe, clutter-free environment.
Another distinct offering is Québecor’s fleet of 50 Mobile digital screen – taxi top. Travelling 77 000 km per week and generating over 1M impressions weekly, the double-sided LCD screens provide advertisers with an extended reach into areas with limited billboard availability. Available programmatically, this mobile inventory gives advertisers the flexibility to quickly launch contextual campaigns, bringing dynamic messaging to high-traffic zones.
Influencing decisions indoors with high-impact screens in high-traffic areas
Québecor also maintains a strong footprint in strategic indoor environments through its Shopping Destination, Fitness Destination, and Express Destination networks. These networks are designed to reach consumers at pivotal moments in their day when they’re most receptive to advertising and most likely to make purchasing decisions. Its indoor screens can be found in shopping malls, gyms, convenience stores, and drugstores.
Large-format indoor inventory includes the Toronto Pearson Airport, featuring eight 65” screens that play in synchronization thanks to Broadsign technology, available exclusively through a programmatic private marketplace deal. Québecor also has a premium network of large-format digital screens at Montreal’s Palais des Congrès, ideal for reaching attendees during major events and conferences.
Furthermore, Québecor’s indoor screens have the same ratio as its outdoor screens, making it easy to create a seamless experience across both indoor and outdoor environments that delivers a cohesive and consistent message. Québecor is also the only pan-Canadian indoor advertising network that offers consumer content, national news, weather, and content tailored to its different environments.
Some iconic campaigns that ran on Québecor’s network
Beyond delivering results for advertisers, Québecor has also leveraged its network to showcase how OOH can drive meaningful social impact. For Earth Day on April 22, 2025, they launched an eco-conscious campaign promoting sustainable transportation. With messages like “Every public transit trip is a step towards a common future” and “The electric taxi, driving towards a common future,” the campaign appeared across digital bus shelters and mobile digital screens, raising environmental awareness while highlighting the agility of Québecor’s formats to support timely, contextually relevant messaging.
Another notable campaign was Molson’s “Sponsor the Parents”, which was a heartfelt tribute in support of Team Canada at the Olympic Games and the parents cheering on the athletes behind the scenes. Running across Québecor’s indoor networks located near the athletes’ hometowns, the campaign masterfully combined sentiment, relevance, and geographic targeting. It demonstrated not only the power of Québecor’s network reach but also how OOH can create authentic, personal connections on a national stage.
Why Québecor chose the Broadsign Platform
Increased network reliability and stability
Québecor chose to run its network with the Broadsign Platform due to the company’s longstanding experience and recognition as one of the leading out-of-home software providers in the industry. Since adopting the Broadsign Platform in June 2020, they’ve noticed greater network stability thanks to the platform’s network monitoring capabilities, which have allowed them to quickly identify and resolve system issues, reducing potential downtimes.
Some of Québecor’s favourite features include Broadsign’s campaign delivery, inventory management and reporting capabilities, which, when used together, offer real-time insights on how to maximize network performance. Additionally, Broadsign’s multi-frame feature has been especially useful for its digital bus shelters, enabling dynamic content delivery, like live transit schedules to play alongside ads.
Flexible selling tools that deliver campaigns 99.9% on target
However, the standout advantage to being on the Broadsign Platform has been its flexible selling capabilities, which they leverage for most of its large markets, like Montreal and its neighbouring areas, and for networks with 10 screens or more. Since adopting Broadsign’s flexible selling tools, Québecor has been able to open up its network to more advertisers thanks to goal-based campaigns.
For clients with smaller budgets or occasional DOOH buys, Québecor offers Play Goal campaigns as a more accessible buying option. With this campaign type, advertisers can book a DOOH campaign with a set number of ad plays based on their budget, and the Broadsign Platform will optimally distribute the plays across the selected screens throughout the campaign’s duration.
For Québecor, flexible selling gives them access to Broadsign’s optimization engine. Composed of two features, the optimization engine reallocates campaigns to maximize inventory usage and rebalances ad delivery to guarantee results to advertisers. While the flexible buying approach required an initial adjustment for both Québecor and its clients, the results quickly proved the value of flexible campaigns with ad delivery rates of 99.9%.
“Broadsign’s optimization engine has allowed us to deliver flexible campaigns 99.9% on target, and to say yes to revenue opportunities that we previously wouldn’t have been able to.”
Évannick Godbout Villeneuve, Manager, Business Solutions and Technological Development, Out-of-Home at Québecor.
What’s next for Québecor
Québecor’s dynamic team of seasoned professionals are looking to drive growth by expanding the company’s footprint across the Canadian market. They’ll be focused on developing and optimizing their existing networks while forging new partnerships that will help them deliver an even more impactful experience for advertisers.
Product News | October 11, 2021
Optimize your DOOH network with dynamic campaign management
When discussing growth strategies for an out-of-home (OOH) network, the focus often remains on how to sell more to more buyers. While it is an essential factor for growth, a more urgent question is whether your operational processes are robust and efficient enough to support your desired growth seamlessly.
Despite significant technological advancements in campaign management, particularly for digital out-of-home (DOOH), many media owners still optimize their network and inventory usage manually. Although adopting new technology may seem like a substantial investment of time and cost, maintaining the status quo not only hinders but also limits your network’s growth potential.
Manually shuffling campaigns to optimize inventory usage and accommodate incoming campaign requests from advertisers is not only time-consuming and error-prone but also unsustainable for long-term growth. Why opt for a manual process when there are tools purpose-built to provide the best way to allocate inventory and maximize fill rates?
Meet Broadsign’s optimization engine
For media owners looking for a smarter, more automated approach to optimizing their network, Broadsign’s optimization engine is the tool for you. Available for directly sold DOOH campaigns leveraging flexible campaign types, it’s designed to ensure that campaigns deliver on target, while optimizing your inventory usage to maximize revenue. Our optimization engine runs continuously in the background, even overnight, to ensure your network is always optimally filled.
Broadsign’s optimization engine works its magic through two key features: campaign rebalancing and reallocation. Rebalancing adjusts the pacing of a campaign, speeding it up or slowing it down, to keep under- or over-performing campaigns on track.
The reallocation feature is used at the time of booking. If an advertiser’s incoming request requires a screen that is already booked by another campaign, the system will automatically reorganize how screens are allocated to each campaign, while ensuring that newly allocated screens still fit campaign requirements.
How we helped media owners deliver more campaigns, more efficiently
You might be wondering how Broadsign’s optimization engine performs in the real world. Well, here’s some data just from 2024 demonstrating how we helped media owners make the most out of their inventory. 26% of all directly sold flexible DOOH campaigns booked through the Broadsign Platform leveraged our rebalancing feature. Users who leveraged our rebalancing feature had three times more campaigns on target and 37% fewer underperforming campaigns.
While the data for reallocation varied due to each media owner’s network being different, most could accommodate, on average 10% to 20% morecampaigns. However, a few select were able to achieve up to 40% more campaigns. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, let’s take a look at some customer success stories.
75Media was able to increase its fill rates by 15%
In 2024, 80% of DOOH campaigns that ran on 75Media’s network leveraged flexible campaigns. The favoured campaign type was the Campaign Average Share of Voice (SoV), which allows advertisers to define the average percentage of screen time their ad should get over the campaign’s duration.
So what makes it flexible? The SoV on each screen can shift from day to day to make room for other campaigns, as long as the target average SoV across all screens is consistently met over the course of the campaign. Broadsign’s optimization engine makes this possible by leveraging our rebalancing feature to modify the pace at which a campaign is delivered to guarantee results.
Orb achieved 99% ad delivery rates
Irish media owner Orb leveraged Play Goal campaigns to introduce flexible selling to its more traditional clients. This allows the client to define how many times they want the ad to play within a given time frame, and Broadsign’s optimization engine ensures that the goal is not only met but optimally distributed across all selected screens throughout the campaign’s duration.
Through Broadsign’s PoP reports, Orb has shown ad delivery rates of up to 99% on flexible campaigns and 95% on slot-based campaigns. Access to this data has not only allowed Orb to reassure its traditional buyers of the effectiveness of flexible campaigns but also helped them attract new customers.
As media owners, like 75Media and Orb have demonstrated, embracing automation through Broadsign’s optimization engine isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic advantage. By automating certain operational processes, like campaign pacing and screen allocation, media owners can unlock new inventory potential, deliver more campaigns with greater precision, and ultimately boost revenue without increasing workload. If you’re serious about scaling your network while maintaining top-tier performance, it’s time to leave manual processes behind and let Broadsign’s optimization engine work for you.
